Mac Lion - OSX 10.7

Over the next two weeks I’ll be publishing a series of short videos to help people with some of the minor changes they’ll be experiencing having migrated from Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6) to Mac Lion (OSX 10.7).

My initial impressions of OSX Lion are very favourable. I’ve noted that Apple has managed to maintain the same look & feel for the novice user whilst providing some essential and sometimes powerful tools for the experienced in the background.

The new Mail application is a great example of a good product, which is now even better. Whilst Apple’s Mail application was the first to provide access to Microsoft’s Exchange 2007 platform (long before Microsoft’s Outlook 2003) and its enhanced features, the application itself was limited and often prone to crashing.

Moreover, access to Gmail as an IMAP service was ‘hit-and-miss’. Mail messages would appear and disappear at random and the Internet forums where full of similar complaints from people utilising hosted Exchange mail. The application interface was agricultural and navigation between separate accounts was awkward. However, it was still a better alternative to Microsoft’s Entourage.

The new version of the Mail application has a very strong corporate interface. Navigation is intuitive and possibly a queue that other’s will follow. The ability to show and hide the folders is not new however the icon allowing this action (see picture) is both intuitive and convenient.

The ability to add shortcuts to folders whilst not new is further enhanced by the ‘show-hide’ feature of the folders. As a user who hordes mail messages and catalogues each one infinitum, my folder list is extensive and the simple task of filing messages had been inconvenient until the release of this evolutionary Mail application.

It’s not all good news though. Put simply, Safari is a disaster.

Whilst I’ve yet to determine if the issues I’m experiencing are related or otherwise it would appear that Safari in the Snow Leopard guise was bullet-proof and curdled milk in Lion.

I’ve noted that Adsense accounts will not display and that the CPU utilisation is sometimes at it’s maximum whenever Safar is launched. Understandably, most people aren’t concerned with Adsense advertisements’ however it’s a simple technology that all browsers should be able to accommodate. I’ve tested both Chrome and Firefox without issue hence I’m hopeful that Apple is aware of the issue and is busy working on a solution.

I’ve also read a number of forum posts where people are claiming that applications have stopped working since the upgrade. This is par-for-the-course normally whenever an operating system is overhauled. Most industry experts are advising that people wait a few weeks before upgrading giving software developers time enough to adapt to the new OS.

The next fortnight will be an interesting period as people upgrade and adapt to Mac OSX Lion. I’ll be keeping an eye on what’s being said and posting to my Mac Lion blog in conjunction with the video’s I mentioned earlier.

In the interim, let’s hope that Mac OSX 10.7.1 is on it’s way with some serious solutions for Safari.