NOTE: I am not some computer genius. I’m a guy who surfs the net a lot and tries to fix his computer himself. I know a bit more than my parents about computers, but
I am in no way Tim Berners-Lee.
Thanks to the fine folks over at Demonoid, I grabbed a copy of 0x 7 yesterday and installed it on my laptop.
First things first: You can only run this if you have a Core 2 Duo or i5 or i7. Don’t think your old G4 Cube can handle this operating system. Also, Core Duos, sorry, you’re out. You guys are the new Power PC. Second, there’s no installation DVD. You download and launch the .dmg and everything else is taken care of for you. This was especially welcome to me, because my DVD drive broke after I dropped my laptop. Just double click the .dmg, and let it sit for around 45 minutes (my black MacBook – 2.2 Ghz core 2 duo – told me it would take 30 minutes, but that bastard lied to me) and then you’ll be done.
Upon restart, everything looks pretty much the same. I don’t know if the general release will have a welcome video, but I didn’t get one. The first thing I noticed was that Geektool doesn’t work. Some research showed that I had a really old version, and the new one works, but you can’t edit it. Since I couldn’t build a new one, I am going to have to wait until an update comes along before I can get weather and my calendar on my desktop again. This is going to take some getting used to. Second thing I noticed was that my totally-on-the-level copies of Photoshop and Office don’t work anymore. This is because they are super old, and were built for a Power PC environment. 10.6 had a utility called Rosetta that allowed PPC programs to run on it (for those of you old enough, think of “Classic Environment” on 10.0-10.3 or 4). That’s gone. So are my old-ass programs. So long, Age of Empires 2.
There’s quite the laundry list of new stuff here. The coolest sounding one is “Resume.” You close a program, and it re-opens just as you had it last. This worked in Safari, but not in Chrome. Possibly an update will help, but I’ll have to wait and see as I have the latest version installed. Guys who still live with mom, beware. I can totally see you closing your browsers quickly so mom doesn’t catch you jerking off, only to forget, and re-open it because you want to show your family this totally awesome dancing panda YouTube. One annoying thing I have found with this is that every readme that I get when I download something opens in perpetuity unless I click the little x to close that window and then quit TextEdit. Otherwise, you’re gonna open up fifteen readmes at the same time. AutoSave and Versions will help those of you still in school and writing papers, but seeing as this is the longest thing I have written in like four years, they aren’t going to help me that much. I haven’t tried out air drop, but seeing as how I am rarely without either a thumb drive or a wireless network, I don’t think this will get much use either.
Mail got a lot better as well. I like the sidebar view of my emails rather than the one line they got at the top of the window in the previous version. My favorite addition is threads. My work email sucks, and we get hit with a lot of spam. Our retarded IT department’s solution was to use a program that grouped everything it thought was spam into one message and then send that out at the top of the hour. so now, instead of going to my spam folder to find an email I really need, but my computer thought was boner pills (it actually is. Don’t judge), now I have to wait up to an hour to get the thing. Well, now mail groups those actually useless messages all together, so when I come in in the morning, I don’t have to hopscotch around my inbox to get rid of those things. This is going to shave seconds off my day. All of those features (providing Chrome takes advantage of Resume because I am NOT going back to Safari) are really cool. Now for some stuff that I think previous versions did better, and things that I find redundant and stupid.
Did you like Spaces? Me too. I loved how I could kick into the spaces view and grab the window that I needed to use next, because I knew where it lived on the grid. Now we have Mission Control. This combines Expose and Spaces into one less-good result. The separate windows are now shown in a row, so now you have to look at what is running in that space to find the program you want.
This wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass if I could really see any definable features in each window. Now I have to look for the one that sort of looks like iCal (it’s got wood trim now, so that helps) and go to that one. Here’s something with Mission Control that I can’t believe nobody found:
See, one of the programs I’m using (installing iLife 11) covers up some of the other spaces, so I have to either guess, or go to another space and kick into Mission Control from there to see the whole picture. You can’t move individual apps around in this view to get the installer out of the way. Maybe this will change with the release, but I doubt it. Here’s something else stupid, Launchpad. 
Seriously, instead of Lion, they should have called this Space Mountain. Launchpad has all of your apps laid out like an iOS device. Because that was my big complaint. You know this laptop? How can it be more like my phone? Oh, you mean by taking everything in my dock and putting it in a separate window so I can filter through three pages to find the app I want? Thanks, mister! Like your iPhone, you can drag the apps around into whatever order you want and put them in folders. The folders max out at 32 items. I cleaned them up so I didn’t have four pages of mess that I was never going to look at, but if I just left it, it would drive me batty. I noticed that I have three folders named “Unused.” Perhaps I should do something about that. I find this feature lame because I have a dock. The dock is cool. I even dragged my applications folder down there so whenever I download something that wants me to drag it to my applications folder, I can just drag it down to the dock. And if I need an app that I don’t normally keep in the dock, I click there, and scroll through in alphabetical order, using my mouse’s scroll wheel. I don’t have to swipe to the side to get to the next window. So, launchpad, lame/using the dock the way it was meant to be used, awesome. I can’t get into the multitouch gestures because my laptop doesn’t support them. I have the two finger scroll, and the rest of it is too hard for it to understand, or something. There’s got to be a completely valid reason why my laptop doesn’t get that driver. It can’t be because they want me to buy a new one. Well, Mister Apple, I’m waiting to see if you guys shoot yourself in the foot with this Tunderbolt, or if USB3.0 will be the new Betamax. Then I’ll get your new fancy theremin of a trackpad where in order to bring up my user account window, I have to draw a picture of a kangaroo with my finger or something.
One thing they greatly improved is the print screen.
They’ve now integrated the print preview into the screen, which is a breakthrough I never thought of before. I never used print preview because it was a pain in the ass to go view the doc, and then not be able to print from that screen. I just forgot it existed. Now I get to see what I’m going to print out, so I don’t have to rock the trial-by-error method anymore.
I was asked by a friend if they should hold off on getting the OS. I don’t see why. It’s not like it’s going to go away, or something. Just keep an eye on how many PPC apps you use, and get ready to update them.
