On OS X Lion
- I haven’t installed Lion yet owing to an out-of-date backup. I’m waiting on a hard drive from NewEgg before I tempt fate.
- Think of the new default scrolling direction as “I want to push the content this way”. It makes more sense.
- Many of the transitionary changes in Lion (scrolling direction, dock indicators, scrollbars) all have ways to revert to the functionality of prior OS X releases. This is an odd choice for Apple, as they tend to make changes that they view as improvements, leaving in the dust people used to the legacy methods.
- The new login screen is bordering on hideous, but the unlock screen (which uses the user’s desktop picture instead of the ubiquitous linen pattern) is beautiful.
- I dislike the new iCal for how horrible the faux leather texture looks, but I dislike Address Book even more. It doesn’t resemble any real address book I’ve ever seen. It’s a usability nightmare. The stack of pages on either side never changes, the hanging bookmark is a button to show groups (as one would, of course, expect), and one can’t actually flip through the “book”.
On Google+
- Google+ is an odd rethinking of the typical user privacy model. Usually, person A requests permission to see person B’s information. Person B can accept or deny this request. On Google+, it’s almost the inverse. Person A adds person B to their whitelist, and person B gets a notification that person A is now sharing their content. Person B can choose to share their content with person A or not, but person B can now view person A’s content without requesting it.