Time Spent With Lion

Things I like

• Auto-popup of authentication sheets at public wifi hotspots like Starbucks works great.
• Love the new spelling correction hints that let you see what it wants to do before autocorrecting it - giving you a chance to say no.
• Love the fact that you can now hold down a key to get the tilde/umlaut/whatever accent marks.
• Mission Control allows me to find windows that are open a little faster due to grouping by App than expose
• I love that Safari auto-restores, and Pages, and Textedit, and...
• Fast launches
• Versions of previous pages
• Apps conforming to the new document standard don't force me to save before dragging into Mail App, etc.
• For the same apps, not having to worry about saving the stuff I'm working on when I close the program. It gets saved as I'm working on it too. 
• Call me nuts but I actually like the new three-column layout in Mail.
• You can search by multiple terms within Mail, etc.
• Seeing battery status, etc. on the login screen.
• PDF annotation. Not just "signature" graphics, but actual text entry, etc. even on PDF's that are not pre-configured as forms (for an example of the latter, download your typical IRS tax form as PDF).

Things I dislike

• Effectively borked the minimize-to-app in Mission Control
• Using "Duplicate" instead of "Save as" can be a bit unexpected at first.
• The "hold key" behavior does mess up people who like repeat keys enabled.
• Why did you cripple digital color meter?
• The "real life" look of the address book and iCal is a bit much, but I can deal with it.

TextWrangler Reminder

If you're getting started in programming, or you just need a way to sanitize text you copied before pasting it into a web editor, you will want to look at TextWrangler from the guys at Bare Bones Software.

While the interface is considered dated by some, it still has one of the best grep-based multi-file search and replace tools available on a Mac editor, and one of the best file comparison tools I've seen. It's also free, and available via the Mac App Store.

When do You Have to Buy Office?

One tool that no computer should be without is the one we typically call an "Office suite" - a collection of programs to manipulate words, numbers, and data so that we can present that information to other people. Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, and Outlook are the gold standard for this. For years, companies spent hundreds of dollars for each copy - and frankly, many pirated copies - because they were the de-facto standard if you wanted to send files to someone else and have them be understood.

Office has withstood the onslought of Adobe's PDF standard, because you cannot easily edit spreadsheets and text documents once they are PDF files. Despite the foothold in the law community, Wordperfect is effectively an also-ran.

Yet, there are alternatives. On the Mac side, there is Apple's iWork suite and the OpenOffice - based NeoOffice. For mac, Linux, and Windows, Open Office and Libre Offic all try to capture the breadth of features and feel of Microsofts 800-lb gorilla. For most people, they succeed admirably, and given how well most convert documents in and out of the MS Office formats, there is little need for most people to buy a copy from Microsoft.

So why in this environment should anyone go out and pay good money for a suite that comes from Microsoft?

Exchange

Google is making significant headway with its powerful online mail, document, and calendar sharing services. Nevertheless, it doesn't quite meet the power and flexibility - or cost, complexity, etc. - of an Exchange server, especially when it comes to shared contacts. Exchange is completely integrated with Outlook, and nothing else quite works so well for the people who need those features.

MAPI and OLE

Office provides several ways for other programs to communicate with them. A number of programs - especially business or industry-specific ones, use these to create emails or documents from scratch including word processing and spreadsheet documents. Unfortunately, in this case, no combination of Open Office, Thunderbird, etc. are going to quite do the job.

Compatibility

Other office suites currently are very capable when exporting to or importing from the Microsoft document formats. Minor variations in formatting can creep up between different versions of the Microsoft suite (2003, 2007, Mac) as well. Nevertheless, when formatting fidelity, etc. is a must, the results are much better if you stick to the same software all around instead of converting between completely different document formats.

Your boss/school/etc. Told You to.

You can argue that "Exchange" or "Compatibility" also qualifies here, but if your boss, company, or school says to use office, well, then that's what you do.

In short

If no-one is forcing you. If you don't need complete integration with an Exchange server. If you don't need as close to perfect compatibility as possible with other MS Office users, or use software that requires Office to use all of its features, you may want to consider the cheap or free alternatives available to you. Otherwise, well, you need to bite the bullet and go get a copy of MS Office.

Lion: Smooth Sailing With a Few Waves

I'd been putting together some thoughts on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. when Lion was released. Obvioulsy, I immediately installed it - I can afford to. I have backups. Lots of backups.

So what is there to say that hasn't already been said?

First, some high points. In case you've never been bitten by this, never, ever, ever upgrade a business-critical computer until the software you need is updated to work with it. Ever. That especially applies to niche software like architectural CAD software, or if you make a living as a graphic designer.

Also, "rosetta" - the technology that allows Macs to run older programs depending on "PowerPC" chips, is no longer available, at all. This especially hurts those who use products like Quicken for the Mac  (Intuit, along with Adobe, is another company that seems to think that adapting to long-announced changes and providing current product updates is just passe). Also, Mac versions of MS Office before Office 2008 will not be usable without an update or switching to iWork or Open Office/Libre Office.

Please note - if you are using Quicken for the Mac, please export your file as a backup before upgrading OS X.

So now what?

Well, I'm not every user. I make my living helping other users. That said, many of the programs I use are the ones I recommend to others.

 The Install

Straightforward. Buy the app, let it download, let the installer run. Wait 30 minutes or so after that, and a new splash page appears with your login.

The first thing I checked, as with every major update since 10.5 completely reset the printer settings, was to verify my printers were still there. Yes they were, and yes they worked. Also, as shown below, the 10.7 update didn't scrub my custom keyboard shortcut for  printing PDF's (originally at OSX hints).

 Personal Information and Mail

I started up the new Mail app, and ended up waiting quite a while for it to update the mail database to the new format. In the meantime, I opened up my google account in Safari, and discovered a new wrinkle. When logging in to at least several services that Lion recognizes using Safari (I can verify this for Gmail and MobileMe), Safari helpfully asks of you wish to add the account to your mail and calendars. Since those accounts were already in Mail.app (which was updating) I simply said no thanks, but it's a nice touch that goes hand-in-hand with automatically opening up the login sheets at many public WiFi hotspots.

Once the mail had finally updated, I looked in the system preferences. Oddly, even though the soon-to-be-obsolete MobileMe control panel listed that I was syncing my contacts, the (new) unified "Mail, Contacts, & Calendars" account panel showed my Mobileme account as only synchronizing calendar items, mail , and chat items.

Yes, chat items. I'm not sure where that will lead just yet. 

Either way, my contacts do sync. 

Looking into my address book, I discovered that Address book was no longer syncing with Gmail. I fixed that, and after a few rounds of discrepancy reviews, had my contacts under control again.

Scrolling

I'm still torn on the scroll direction reversal. I will say that it's actually fairly natural when scrolling via a trackpad. 

That said, the hiding scrollbars were driving me nuts. I need to know where I am in the document, and the default setting to hide them when not scrolling can make it difficult to tell if there is anything further to scroll to.

Apps

Despite the dire warnings at the beginning of this post, very little broke.  The following third-party apps worked without any apparent hitches:

• Hazel - an automated folder cleanup tool.
• Both of my password programs - 1Password and Little Secrets - worked fine.
• DropBox
• BBEdit - text editor
• Candybar - custom icons.
• Chrome
• iStumbler seems to work
• LibreOffice
• Kindle
• MailPluginManager seems to work
• Notational Velocity a text note taker that works with simplenote
• Google music manager
• Picasa picture manager
• Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection 2
• Steam seems to work - but I havent tried to play any games yet
• VLC - video player for flash and WMV videos

The following programs needed or had a Lion specific update that hadn't yet been installed:

• Xcode - New copy currently free
• Homebrew - a system for installing linux utilities. Installed apps actually work, but you need to isntall the updated Xcode to add anything else.
• Firefox 5 had an update when I opened it, but didn't like my 1Password plugin.
• Carbon Copy Cloner - excellent bootable disk backup system.
• iStumbler - for finding WiFi networks
• I updated Silverlight just in case
• Scrivener has an update for Lion specific features
• VMWare Fusion - this virtual PC emulator installed updates
• Mail Act-On - a mail management plugin for the Apple Mail app, needed a reinstall. 

Then a had a few issues that needed more work:

• Pixelmator (a lightweight, awesome, and cheap image editor) had an issue - but an App Store update is coming soon to resolve it, and there are workarounds to get it running.
• All of my Emacs (another text editor that works on different platforms) customizations and add-ons will have to be rebuilt, but the version I installed through Brew, as well as my GUI-based copy, both work fine at the default settings.

Lastly were the programs that flat out didn't work:

• Pocket Tanks - an "artillery" game knockoff.

All's well that ends well.

Overall, it was a very smooth update. While there are a few things that are known to break, very little broke unexpectedly, and I've now had enough exposure to this to start getting really comfortable. Many apps did not need updates at all, though a number of the ones that didn't need post-upgrade updates had already been updated in the recent past to be compatible with Lion. 

Ha Ha Only Serious...

There's an expression in the geek community, "ha ha, only serious," that tells the listener that the previous parody, joke, etc., may have been intended to be humorous, but also includes a large degree of truth. 

This comes up because I was explaining to a friend a large part of why "Like a D6" (that I mentioned earlier in Parody) was funny. For a lot of gaming geeks, hanging out around a table playing D&D, wargames, boardgames, etc., is just as fun and looked forward to just as much as a "good time" (if not more so) as hanging out in a club with friends and dancing, etc.