OS X Lion [Review]

FULL REVIEW

For years now, Apple has been leading the charge in the field of consumer electronics and user interface design, from a stylistic perspective, Web 2.0 was highly inspired by the Mac OS X operating system, and its use of strong colors, detailed large icons, a clever dock and smooth, stylish visuals.

Apple completely changed the way touch screen phones work with the introduction of the iPhone. The Macbook Pro was the first to integrate Intel’s Light Peak I/O that you might know as Thunderbolt. Apple ushered in the Post PC era with the iPad, and most recently, has done away with the optical drive as seen on the new MacBook Air and Mac Mini. Apple’s new operating system, Lion finally roars to life and we jump in the pen and hope we don’t get our arms bitten off.

Lots of Lion’s features have been seen before, in part in the Snow Leopard updates. Especially the multitouch gestures and the iOS app launcher, the Mac App Store and other features. However, those were just a primer to get your feet wet. Lion has you taking the leap into iOS territory.

Installation
The installation was a breeze, once we got the whopping 3.6 GB file down from the internet for an incredible price of $30. There is a pendrive option also available for a bit more.  Once downloaded, it just installed itself and then booted up with a Getting Started screen that basically showed off the new multitouch features. However, to install Lion, you need to have Snow Leopard installed and then the MacApp store over it. Apple’s strategy for phasing out things is as gentle as throwing you off a cliff and then praying you know how to fly.

 

New Look
At first glance you probably might not notice it, but Lion does sport a new look. As seen before in the Keynotes, Lion has basically borrowed a lot from the iOS, when you stare at those home screen icons. However the changes run deeper; its sporting a lot less gloss, and a lot more subtler gradients in places. On the action items that need colour like the progress bars and like, the colour is a more clear blue.

Also, almost everything has a decidedly iOS feel. From the rubberband movement of the scrolling, to the movement of the homescreens and the animation. Even the scrollbar is the iPad-like, it appears and then disappears. Everything is very neat and clean. The palette is again, very similar to that of iOS. Just keep both the iPad and the testing MacBook Pro side by side, and everything looks almost exactly the same give or take the contrast ratio and black density of the display.

 

 

Multitouch Gestures and its applications
With the new Macs, MacBooks all equipped with multitouch trackpads, and for those without it, there’s the Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse. Gestures were introduced in Snow Leopard as a sort of a test as to how the users will react. Apple has trained us already with their iOS user interface, and they’ve bought this natural feel to the desktops.

Lion has a great video tutorial on gesture based interfaces to show you what your trackpad can do. Not only that, you can turn on and off these gestures. However, I would highly recommend turning them all on, as with a little bit of practice, OS X becomes a superbly navigable interface. Lets go through all the newer features and see how its changed with Multitouch

Natural Scrolls
First thing you might notice is the new reverse scrolling system.  By default, on scrollwheels and various touch scroll strips and trackpads, down is up, and up is down. However that's not the case in mobile devices, which lets the scroll move in the kinetic direction of your finger. Up is up, down is down. This shift feels more logical and natural, Lion is extremely fluid with these gestures too.

The Web
In the later updates of Snow Leopard when touch was introduced, the gestures were a bit laggy, here it’s smooth and fluid, better integrated into the system. Double tapping in Safari with two fingers zooms in, and double tapping again zooms out, just like on iOS. Yes, you can also pinch and zoom. Not only that you can two finger swipe left and right to go back and forth on the web page.

Mission Control and Navigation
Then there’s the nifty Mission Control, where a three finger swish up will bring up a familiar redesigned Expose. Launch Control in a glimpse shows you whats open on your system as well as whats going on in the different Spaces, and is extremely intuitive when switching between open tasks. If you tap on each application set, you can see the open application windows and select the ones you want to focus on.

Spaces works like different desktops and you have a total of four desktops at your disposal. Introduced in Snow Leopard, this is a nifty feature that lets you segregate your desktop for application groups. You can navigate between desktops with three finger swipes, left of right. Not only that, if you hold down three fingers for a few seconds you can move around the window in front. Lion has just simplified getting around your mac.

LaunchPad
The dock at the bottom of the screen initially was to be a short cut menu for your applications, the rest of the applications were in a folder tucked away in the system. This was an odd decision, and up until Leopard, which introduced the jump lists, you had to go way deep to access the other programs.

However, with the introduction of the launch pad, everything is much better. In Lion, bringing up the launch pad is as easy as a four finger outward pinch, and to close it, you must pinch in. The Launch Pad is exactly like an iOS homescreen with all your programs appearing as icons.

Full Screen Applications
No more fumbling around during presentations, moving windows here and there. All you need to do is just draw a line up and then tap. Like an inverted ! mark. What it does it makes your program full screen, no dock, nothing. If you’re reading a book, or just working on something in Photoshop. Nothing disturbs you. You can easily switch between full screen applications with a three finger swipe left and right. This is by far one of the best additions to OS X so far.

Magic Mouse
While it may seem that the touchpads have got maximum attention, the magic mouse also has its fair share of gestures. Though the gestures vary a bit, mostly for the comfort level of mouse users, but it’s as quick getting around Lion on a Magic mouse as it is on a touchpad.

Usability
It’s hard to put your finger on it, and that pun was intended, (thank you and I’ll be here all night) but it’s as if Apple has copy-pasted the sensibilities of using their touch-based mobile devices on Lion. To simplify it, Lion feels natural, as if it’s using the iPhone or iPad, its a sense of fluidity. Sometimes I actually found myself just playing around idlly with the touch gestures just to see how awesome they are.

Speed, Stability and Rosetta
Apple with almost every product refresh tries something completely bold and ballsy, and more often than not it works. They did it with the micro sim, html5 and now they’re doing it with phasing out the optical drive and completely cutting off any ties with the PowerPC. Theres no more Rosetta in Lion. Rosetta was basically a PowerPC emulator that was running in a layer so that people could still run their old PowerPC Mac software. The upside is that Lion is extremely fast, without that extra memory being held up. Everything flies, especially the responsiveness of the gestures and the speed of the OS in general.

So far Lion is pretty stable, though I experienced lots of crashes when I plugged in one of those internet dongles. Other than that, everything worked as it should.

Other features
Apple’s website boasts of over 250 new features packed into Lion. Most of them are minor and if we actually took the time to review them all in great detail, I am afraid that you’ll probably get old, your kids will have kids, and so forth. Unless you already have kids who have kids. You get the drift. So lets cover the ones that really piqued our interest in a big way.

Resume
The workaholic internet generation, riddled with A.D.D begrudgingly leave their machines to turn in for the night. PC’s usually never start where you left off. Its annoying, and Apple has solved our woes with Resume. Which essentially saves your work the way you left it. Theres also an Autosave feature that well, autosaves your documents and Versions, a feature that’s adds a Time Machine-like interface to cycle between the version history of your documents.

AirDrop
This is another feature that justifies the price of Lion. AirDrop lets you connect to other Macs across your Mac’s Airport Wi-fi, at ranges of around 30 feet. This is totally useful in dropping in files to the different departments, or dropping in love notes to that beauty sitting in the corner with the sexy Macbook.

So, should you upgrade to Lion?
The answer is a resounding yes. Not only because of the fantastic gesture-based interface, but also because its much faster. However, if you have a lot of legacy applications you use, then its better if you stay at Snow Leopard. Also, readers with older macs or Macbooks might want to spring in for a Magic Trackpad to get the best out of Lion. You can use what you have, but you won’t be getting the best out of your upgrade. Also those who are still stuck at Leopard, tough beans, you still have to shell out for Snow Leopard first before upgrading, or perhaps that PenDrive Lion install might just upgrade directly. Do let us know how it went.

Lion draws the perfect balance between mobile and PC, combining the two for the best possible usability to get the Mac back into the forefront of the game. Definitely worth it.