Saturday, July 23, 2011

7 days to Qualify



it's gonna be four tough days from Aug 1st to 4th, wish for the best!


Saturday, July 9, 2011

Mac OS X Lion Pros and Cons






Having been testing Lion for a few days, I‘m starting to get used to the new system. Below is what I've found.

Pros:
  • Airdrop makes sharing much easier.
  • Versioning keeps track of modification history.
  • App full screen is a nice feature but it doesn't work quite well on non-apple applications, at least for now.
  • Reader in Safari works like an information aggregator, it detects the core information on a page and display it in a pretty decent way.
  • Built-in dictionary and smart zoom are two smart features, but dictionary is a little slow.

Cons:
  • When switching between desktops, desktop icons sometimes don't show up.
  • Back/forward gestures disabled, even in finder. So you need to press on that little back/forward arrow to go back or forward in applications like Chrome. However, one could use two/three finger swipe gesture to switch between pages in Safari, iCal. It seems that Apple is trying to promote its own apps.
  • When switching to an app on a different desktop with Finder open, screen would give a quick flash.
  • Launchpad is not as useful as it seems, you could always use spotlight or third-party search apps to find things quickly.
  • Switching between apps is not as straightforward as in Snow Leopard where you could just swipe four fingers and select the one from the active apps. Whereas in Lion, there is mission control, you need to switch between desktops first and find the target app and then activate it.
All in all, I don't think it's a major release, it could just as easily be an upgrade. It might take some time to adjust to the new gestures if you are already familiar with Snow Leopard, especially with the new "Natural Scroll Directions", which allows you to swipe like the way on iPhone. So if you turn this feature on, you will be treating your touchpad as the screen, swiping up means grab the page and pull it up, yielding pagedown, which is just the opposite to the traditional scrolling.