Apple released Mac OS X.7 (Lion) on Wednesday, July 20th. The change in this release is it’s all online. By logging into the Mac App Store, you can purchase Lion for $29.99 and it will download and install on to your machine. Those who are purchasing new machines with Lion, you will no longer receive a set of disks. Part of your hard drive will be partitioned as a restore drive. You can also recover by using Command R as you start up.
The great thing about getting your software this way is there is nothing to loose. On the flip side, if your drive completely craters – then you have to find a professional that has access to the Lion installer. Most of them will be at the Apple Store or your favorite Apple Tech. You can however create your own. If you haven’t upgraded yet, after the download and before the install, you’ll want to pull the file from your Applications folder that says Lion Install. The file is about 4 GB. It will fit on a 4 GB flash drive, but barely. Then complete the install. When it’s finished installing, it will delete the files. This ushers a whole new era of how those of us that do tech work, work.
For those of us, who did upgrade yesterday, I’ve heard the download times started at about 45 minutes and extended to 15 hours. My first machine, took 45 minutes to download, and hour to install and about an hour and a half to download all the updates from all my application vendors. Don’t forget to run software up date, all of your iWork and iLife apps will need to be updated before you open them. The second machine I installed Lion on took 6 hours to download, 45 minutes to install and about 30 minutes to do all of the updates. Of course it was later in the day when everybody else seemed to be on Apple’s servers as well. The one thing I noticed on both installs was that it killed all of my bandwidth. Not just for the internet, but for my network as well. If you can, be sure to plug your machine into a wired connection to download Lion.
The first thing you want to do is backup your machine. Then make sure that you have the latest version of Mac OS X.6.6 or later. Check that your machine is at least a Core 2 Duo chip or better and that you have a minimum of 4 GB of memory. If all of these things are true, you are ready to install. I can’t stress because this is a download – be sure you have backed up your machine.
Some of the things that I’ve noticed in Lion:
1. The interface is much cleaner. Remember those arrows that allow you to scroll up and down? They are gone. The scroll bar only shows up when you need it and you have to look for it, because it’s just a little darker than the window. You can also use any of the sides of the windows to make the windows larger or smaller. Of course the reason you don’t need those scroll arrows is with a track pad, you now use two fingers to scroll in any window. This also gives you more real estate in the same space.
2. Many of the extra windows when setting up printers or other devices are all gone. It not hard to find the things you are looking for, but it will take a few times through the new windows to get use to them. I did have to delete all of my printers and re-add them, now they are all working better than they did in Snow Leopard. However, there are some color issues. If you are in the middle of a project that is color based, don’t upgrade until you can spend a little time working with your settings. My printers were working perfectly before the upgrade, so I have to spend sometime resetting my ColorSync Profiles. Need all your settings for your printer? Click the Show Details buttons.
3. On Safari, like everything else in Lion – the window has been cleaned up and you can see when it’s downloading without a window to tell you that. It has an arrow on the right hand side of the screen that turns blue as it downloads and fills the circle around it showing the percentage that has downloaded. It’s very clean and great.
4. Remember that any of your programs that still have Power PC Code in them, won’t work in Lion. There is not support for those applications. Office 2011 is the only version of Microsoft Office that will work in Lion. Quicken 2007 and QuickBooks 2010 will both need to be upgraded to the latest versions in order to run in Lion. For those that use Adobe products, both 5 and 5.5 run fine. I have a project with 4 this weekend, so will know if it runs. I know Dreamweaver CS 4 runs fine. I did have to update my java in order to get it to open. It’s a quick update. FileMaker 10 and 11 work fine, but FileMaker 6 will not work. Another project that I need to finish. Then I can get rid of 6. One of the big issues everyone is talking about is screen sharing, logmein, and remote desktop from Apple and Microsoft – I can say with certain that all except Microsoft’s Remote Desktop work with just updates for your system. Download all the latest updates after installing Lion and they all work like a champ.
5. In Mail, it looks very much like Mail on your pad. I have thousands of email that I need access to regularly, so I’ve chosen to show my list of folders, so instead of two columns I have three. Now in the second column you can see your mail sorted by date, but in the email window you can see the whole thread of the conversation. A great marriage between traditional and new work flow without taking those of us who are set in our ways into the next level of computing. Again, here the windows are very clean, giving you more real estate to view things in your windows. Although I now have three columns of stuff I look at, my message list and message area are both larger than they were before.
I know there are lots of really cool features and many people have written about them. These are the things that I’ve already gotten quite a few calls about, so thought it would help if everyone could see the little things too.
