>scrolling now works as it does on iOS devices--drag up on the trackpad to scroll down, drag down to scroll up--complete with "rubber-band" effects at the end of scrollable areas.
This doesn't make sense to me from a design sense. With an iPhone or iPad, your finger was touching the screen, so it emulated real "dragging" content down to where you could see it. With a computer however, there's a disconnect between the screen and your fingers, which makes it not as intuitive. Combine this with a few years of two finger scrolling being the exact opposite, and I feel like this will kind of be a pain to get used to.
I think that there is conceptually no superior way of scrolling. One is as good as the other. Traditionally you dragged the scroll bar, in Lion you drag the page, one makes about as much sense as the other.
What is a problem is that everyone is used to dragging the scroll bar, not the page but I’m not sure whether that’s going to be a big problem. I tried it and my brain already flipped for vertical scrolling after an hour or so. (I still get horizontal scrolling wrong.)
> I think that there is conceptually no superior way of scrolling.
...which means you should go with the mechanism people have already internalized. I thought that was a key principle of UI design: if you don't have a good reason to violate established expectations, don't do it.
One argument for the new behavior is that more people have internalized scrolling behavior on a modern touchscreen browser than have internalized the old MacBook way of scrolling. It makes even more sense looking forward. Steve Jobs has predicted that classic keyboard-equipped computers are going the way of "trucks" - if that's the case, it makes some sense to standardize toward touchscreen conventions.
> ...which means you should go with the mechanism people have already internalized. I thought that was a key principle of UI design: if you don't have a good reason to violate established expectations, don't do it.
Sure that's good advice for beginners, but Apple is good at design. They know the rules and the know when to break them. This is how design evolves; because great designers can imagine how something new could ultimately be better once users get used to it.
If you just follow all the rules you end up like Jakob Nielsen, with a data-backed justification for every detail, all of which adds up to something inelegant and ugly as sin.
This reminds me of some usability trials I did last year - relatively few of the users employed the mousewheel to scroll (only one, as I remember it) when viewing web pages. But almost all of them had iPhones so obviously they knew how to scroll there.
I'm a two-finger scroller on my Macbook, I'd be willing to accept the argument that there are actually more people doing it in the iOS way now.
It's worse than that. One finger dragged up moves the cursor up, two fingers dragged up scrolls the window... down? Is it really sensible to be internally inconsistent?
It also runs counter to scroll wheels on mice, which has a physical reason for the direction too.
It's one way to look at it. I'm used to the behavior of the scroll wheel, and also the scroll keys - moving the cursor down will necessarily move the underlying page up to keep it visible, so that equates to 'scrolling down' in my mind. This was completely logical until smartphones came along. Obviously Apple are finding a lot of their users believe (or soon will believe) otherwise.
- Up arrow (eventually) scrolls the page down, too.
Looking at it that way, the only exception is be single finger drag. I guess that 'has' to be that way because otherwise dragging a finger down a bit would be too different from lifting it shortly, then clicking a bit down.
The new scrolling isn't totally incompatible with scroll wheel usage, if you're willing to overthink it a little bit. Imagine that the scroll wheel is resting on the page, and that by applying upward/forward movement to the top of the wheel, you apply downward force to the page, moving your viewing pane higher on the page. Like so: http://imgur.com/245lA
I'd wondered whether they would eventually make that change. I haven't tried it yet but I'm sure interested to. It seems like it may make sense with the iOSification of content/scroll views in Lion — they've added smooth pinch-to-zoom and rubber-band scrolling (where it lets you scroll past the bounds of an item with increasing tension until it snaps back when you let go), so maybe it "feels right" in use. I don't know.
Actually, I was unable to disable it for my Magic Mouse, though. According to the release notes:
"Multitouch trackpads that only support two-finger gestures will not have an option to reverse the scrolling direction in the Trackpad System Preferences pane."
I assume the Magic Mouse only supports two-finger gestures, so maybe that explains it. Either way, I had a really hard time getting used to it.
I ended up having to revert to Snow Leopard thanks to issues with Dropbox, Evernote and NewsRack anyway, but I'd be surprised if that scrolling behavior and a lot of the new UI weirdness actually makes it to the final Lion GM. We'll see.
Versions is nice. After you first save the file every subsequent manual save creates a version. There are consequently not only the automatic hourly versions.
The UI is a bit clunky, though. OS X switches to a fullscreen Time Machine view which felt way too jarring to me.
The locking behavior is also very well thought out. Additionally to automatically locking documents after two weeks, Lion also (better) exposes this functionality in the UI. All this helps to make it much less likely that you will ever accidentally overwrite an old document you used as a template. (When you start editing a locked document a dialog pops up telling you that the document is locked and the default option is not unlock but duplicate which is great.)
How is this going to interact with git and versions (the svn client)? What about my mediawiki install that versions every article already? How deep does this new Versions go?
What we know about Mac OS X Lion:
That it will almost certainly break all the tools you need to run a local web development environment and be a pain to upgrade, but after a few months of weird hacks will go back to being a fabulous working environment for programmers.
Really? Most of the standard web dev stuff (Ruby, PHP, Apache, etc.) comes out of the box and works quite well, and if you need either specialized versions of things (rvm, virtualenv, custom Apache, etc.) or stuff that doesn't come with OS X (lighttpd, node.js, etc.) wouldn't it be installed in /usr/local?
I don't think this will break many web dev tools. Unless you mean stuff like Sequel Pro or TextMate; even then, I can't imagine most apps won't make the transition smoothly.
With the Xcode 4 unix tools installed I had massive build problems with homebrew. Not being able to build mysql, node.js, thinking-sphinx, redis, mongo et al would constitute a pretty broken web dev environment, so if Lion requires the newer version, which most tools don't yet build cleanly under, that's a pretty big problem.
About time, considering the trainwreck that is the Snow Leopard version.
Please, dear god, make that apple finally created something that lets me browse my files as fast again as it was on my Amiga 500 in 1988. Clocked at 7.09 MHz. On floppy disks. I'm sure my 2 GHz machine can do this. It must be possible.
Well, it looks different. I very much doubt that they changed much of the internals – the Finder just was completely rewritten in Cocoa for Snow Leopard.
When is the Finder slow for you? I never had problems with a slow Finder.
I had massive problems with finder. Then I de-installed all sync apps (dropbox, zumodrive, etc) and it's as snappy as any other program now. I will say, zumodrive was a bear to completely un-install. 3 or 4 deep hooks in the system as I recall, and finding one didn't obviously point me to any of the others. I reinstalled dropbox and still don't have problems. Never re-installed the others, so I don't know which one it was.
The grid gone, at least for now. Exposé (now a part of Mission Control) returns more or less to its old behavior. Windows are resized proportionally and no more arranged in a grid. Quicklook continues to work and Exposé now stacks the windows of one application together. It is no longer possible to show minimized windows in Exposé. The dock is still displayed but clicking on an icon no longer displays the windows of that app in Exposé, OS X will just switch immediately to that app (the normal dock behavior).
The Dashboard, all spaces and all fullscreen apps are displayed along the top of the Exposé view. It’s now possible to change the background image for each space individually but no longer possible to arrange Spaces in a grid (there is always a row of spaces). Clicking on a space in Exposé displays all its windows in Exposé mode. The bird’s-eye view of only the spaces is gone but you can drag windows in Exposé from one space to another. The arrow key Spaces shortcuts also allow you to switch to the Dashboard or fullscreen apps.
Proportional-style windows make so much more sense than the grid-based layout. I'm thrilled that they've reverted back to that for Lion's exposé, using the grid for the new Mission Control view.
Considering they're rolling it out via the app store, does this mean the current preview doesn't actually contain a new kernel, just user space enhancements?
They're rolling out the installer via the App Store. The Snow Leopard installer was able to run without having to boot off the install media, so presumably Lion's beta installer is doing the same thing.
The individual point releases (10.6.x) have rolled out new kernels via Software Update (not every time, but it happens), I see no reason why that can't be done over the App Store.
This doesn't make sense to me from a design sense. With an iPhone or iPad, your finger was touching the screen, so it emulated real "dragging" content down to where you could see it. With a computer however, there's a disconnect between the screen and your fingers, which makes it not as intuitive. Combine this with a few years of two finger scrolling being the exact opposite, and I feel like this will kind of be a pain to get used to.