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Operating system upgrades have almost always failed to make headlines. With hardcore geeks as the only exception, buffed up OS versions are all but Greek to the layman. It's all the more striking then, that I've had college-going 18-year olds to 40-something jetsetters asking me whether they should be upgrading to OS X Lion. What makes the latest OS from Apple so alluring, yet so approachable?
Meet the Lion
Flagging off the OS X Lion experience was easier than it might be with a lot of user interfaces today. A direct download from Apple's App Store, the OS X Lion will forever save us the trouble of waiting for the deliveryman and looking for that long-lost CD a couple of months later.
Taking up almost 4GB of your Mac device's memory, the requirements to install the OS include an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3/i5/i7, or Xeon processor and an upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, in case you don't have it already. Once I had this in place, the download was a breeze and I was all set to play around with the Lion.
Let your fingers talk
The new OS X Lion isn't about anything else as much as it is about gestures. However, there's a bit of unlearning I had to do when I started using the interface. The most basic feature, scrolling, is done the ‘other way around' on Lion. I slide my fingers up, like I do on a tablet, to scroll down the page and vice versa. A very low learning curve, this one.
While the trackpad on an Apple laptop would require two fingers to scroll up and down documents and websites, one finger did the trick because I was using the Magic Mouse paired to the iMac on our test bench.
Every window you open on the OS X Lion has a small icon on the top right corner that lets you maximise it to display a full-screen version. Some of the inbuilt iMac applications like Mail, iCal, Photo Booth, Safari and FaceTime also work on the full-screen format. The full-screen did not seem like a groundbreaking feature on the new OS given the fact that the previous OS already had an unobtrusive menu bar.
Apart from these you have the old pinch-to-zoom for photos and web pages when you are using a trackpad (This does not work on the Magic Mouse).
Ready to launch
It's not the tablet-like gestures but the Launchpad that comes closest to emulating an iOS interface on the OS X Lion. Every app I downloaded from the Mac App Store automatically found a place in the Launchpad. Mirroring the iPad user interface, the Launchpad displays multiple home screens you can swipe through. You also have the option of bunching similar apps in a folder. For example, when I dragged GF Golf Lite on to Chess, both got slotted inside an automatically generated ‘Board Games' folder.
Control freak's delight: Mission Control
What seems like a brighter, better avatar of the Exposé is the new command centre, just a click away. Mission Control brings together Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, and apps for a single-glance check which is a boon if you tend to clutter your desktop by opening too many apps and windows at the same time.
Mission Control shows you all open apps at a glance. At the top, it displays a row of windows, called Spaces, starting with the Dashboard and going on to thumbnails of full-screen apps. You can drag an app or a new desktop to this row and add it to Spaces to create a new desktop.
Snail Mail
Configuring our e-mail on the iMac after having installed OS X Lion took its own sweet time. Once the server downloaded all the stuff in ‘Mail', the new layout turned out to be pretty simplistic, very characteristically Apple. Again a ‘déjà vu'-ish feeling, when you see that clicking on a mail gives you a bigger window preview of the text on the right. However, it seemed like the app was trying to cramp in a lot of text in preview, making it slightly difficult to read. You'll probably have to zoom in to read the contents properly if you happen to be myopic like yours truly.
Surf time
You are greeted by the same ol' Safari when you want to browse the web, but the Lion brings about a couple of changes in the way you now use the browser. Say, I log in to the Facebook home page and then decide to check out my friend's party pics. All I have to do to get back to my home page is swipe to the left on the Magic Mouse or the trackpad. This amazingly intuitive gesture renders the Back/Forward button on the browser pretty much useless.
Different strokes
Apple has designated slightly different gestures to manipulate OS X Lion on the Magic Mouse and the trackpad. Here's how we manipulated the Lion differently than we would on an Apple laptop. The three-finger swipe to launch Mission Control does not work with the Magic Mouse, a two-finger double tap does the trick. However, you can jump to specific windows by just scrolling over them in Mission Control mode with both peripherals.
The pinch-to-zoom feature is rendered useless on the Magic Mouse. You will have to do a one-finger double tap to zoom in to a web page or a photograph.
The way you use your Apple TrackPad or Magic Mouse to work with the OS X Lion can be tweaked to your liking in the System Preferences. Scrolling, secondary click, Smart Zoom, swiping and mission control gestures can be turned on or off from here.
When the Lion doesn't roar
Despite all the apparent awesomeness of the OS X Lion, there were a few grumbles and grunts while trying it out. While downloading stuff from the Mac App Store, the iMac froze a couple of times. Also, the process of downloading apps from the App Store seemed unnaturally slow. We had trouble renaming folders on the Launchpad that the system automatically names.
One last word
“Mac OS X meets the iPad” is how Steve Jobs describe the OS X Lion and he couldn't have been more precise. In an obvious attempt to merge the way we interact with both these modern-day computing devices, the OS X Lion makes for a refreshing operating system. The OS X Lion is a teaser of what could possibly go on to become an OS that we probably wouldn't be able to do without a couple of years from now.
Love: Hassle-free installation, fluid, intuitive gesture recognition, iOS-like features, affordable price tag.
Hate: A few bugs in the system.
$29.99
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