OSX Lion Removes Functionality
July 27, 2011 2 Comments
In my previous post I thought I had found a way to maintain some of the functionality that we had in OSX Snow Leopard only to find that I was wrong, and a reboot quickly erased any hope of that. After using Lion for several days, I have found a number of things that are missing, removed, or otherwise unusable in OSX Lion. Needless to say, loss of functionality we used to have is quite disappointing. I’m sure I’m not alone in that I was hoping for some shiny new features from Apple to make my computing experience even more enjoyable. Hope is lost. There are a few new features that I’ve found nice and I am hoping that Apple will listen to the conversation going on and respond by restoring some of the items listed here, and the others that I’m sure others are finding.
Spaces No More
If you are a first time Mac user, Mission Control is a nice feature. I think it’s more approachable for first timers than Spaces was. I’m sure that was Apple’s motivation in this new workflow. My issue with it is twofold:
1. Spaces are in one row. Personally, in spaces I used a 2 by 2 grid. I could go up down, left right. It was fast and efficient. Loved it. But it’s gone now, and I can’t have it that way anymore.
2. Applications don’t remember where they were after reboot. In Spaces, you could assign applications to particular Spaces. You can’t do this anymore. After you reboot, all your applications will open mashed into the first desktop space. Now when I decide to reboot, we have to waste time putting things back in their place. This is a real loss of functionality I am hoping Apple will remedy soon.
Launchpad is Useless
This one isn’t really a loss of functionality since it didn’t exist in Snow Leopard, but it’s something Apple is touting as useful and I don’t buy it. They are trying to make OSX more like iOS, but in this case I don’t see that a large grid of icons is so great. We have the dock for that. And if you want to have more, I like to use a folder of aliases in the dock that quickly fans out with one click and I can get to more apps that way.
Network Utility Lookup Dropdown Removed
A big part of my job is handling domain names, email and website hosting for my clients. The lookup feature in Network Utility was great. You could select what type of DNS records you wanted to see and it would fetch them. The option is now removed; you can still get the records but you can only do the full lookup and get all the records. This is a small thing, but still it’s something useful that has been taken away.
iCal’s Sidebar is Gone
iCal used to have a nice sidebar where you could check off which calendars were shown and which were hidden. Now in order to see this, you need to click a button which opens a panel with these details. This panel obscures the view of part of the calendar. This is a poor design choice. Additionally, Apple has re-skinned the calendar and although it’s just a design preference, I find it quite cheesy. The previous iCal had the look of a standard OSX window. It was clean and professional. I do think iCal definitely took a step back.
I’m sure there are other things I haven’t found yet. Feel free to post yours in the comments. I will update this post with whatever else comes up.
* Slideshow, Apple OSX, Tech Tips
“1. Spaces are in one row. Personally, in spaces I used a 2 by 2 grid. I could go up down, left right. It was fast and efficient. Loved it. But it’s gone now, and I can’t have it that way anymore.”
Agreed, you can’t even loop through the first and last space, this is crazy, what happens if you got 4 spaces like me? You have to switch through them all.
“2. Applications don’t remember where they were after reboot. In Spaces, you could assign applications to particular Spaces. You can’t do this anymore. After you reboot, all your applications will open mashed into the first desktop space.”
Actually you can, just not thanks to the control panel anymore. Just right-click the dock icon of the app you want to assign to a specific space. In the menu that appears, go for “Options” then you’ll see something like “Assign to” and there, you’ll be able to assign it to a specific space. Although – and you’ll see why – it’s not as user friendly as it was before.
Anyways, thanks for this article, you’re one among many pointing out what Lion as somehow lost: functionalities and workflow, the latest being something I cherish(ed?) very much in OSX.
There’s another annoying bug introduced in Lion.
If I’ve got Text Editor open in a Space (say Space 3) and click the dock icon (or do Cmd+N; creating a new document), I don’t get a window for that document in front of me.
The window isn’t even being created at all, not in the foreground, not in the background, not anywhere in this space. Not even in another space.
When I switch BACK to Space 1 (no sane user would naturally switch back to Space 1 manually, I just did this out of suspicion), and indeed, when I switched BACK to Space 1 and then focus the Dock icon for Text Editor, after half a second, a new window pops up for this new document, which I then have to manually drag to Space 3 where I wanted it.
It would make sense for a new window command in an App to execute it right away and show it in the space the user is currently in.
After some online searching I thought I perhaps had Text Editor assigned to Space 1, but this was not the case.
It’s not limited to Text Editor, I have the same problem with Firefox. When I have Firefox open (without any windows) and am in Space 2, clicking the Dock icon (which should open a new window as none is open), it doesn’t open. Instead I have to go back to Space 1 (which naturally causes active App focus reflected in the Menu Bar to switch from Firefox to Finder (which was the active App in Space 1 when I was last there), so I change focus back to Firefox, and then it comes.