Mandaris Moore

At today's macnexus meeting we had Ted Landau come speak about the IOS-ification of Mac OS X and I found it to be rather enjoyable. I agreed with a lot of his points about how certain changes to the OS could be a good thing that it would help all the new recruits¹ get used to the operating system.

The problem for me is that it hasn't been easy for me. Some of the things that I've grown accustomed to were changed in Lion and it took a while to get used² to them or find the best way to work around them. I've since grown used to the dip in performance as certain animations have played out and I even enjoy the way some Mail.app works (to a degree).

My problem is that I still feel that certain things aren't being taken care of properly. I've created a little list of some of my continuing gripes with Lion.

• Mission Control doesn't fully replace Spaces
  I understand that Mission Control is supposed to be more accessible for users and -honestly- I turned Spaces on and off sometimes when I was attempting different workflows, but it seems that takes more work in order to use it. With Spaces, you could assign different application to different desktops, but if you want that in Lion, you have to put the applications into the different spaces by yourself and hopefully you don't need to restart or anything.

• What's the deal with FrontRow?
  If I had a dollar for every time that someone told me to use Plex instead, I'd have at least enough money to get a value meal. If I had a dollar for every person who used the feature minus the guy who tells me to use Plex, at best I'd break even.

• Address book
  I doubt who ever OK'd didn't already have all or most of his contacts already sorted. Navigating between different groups and then putting people into the right place is painful and the interface is ugly. Yes, I've looked at cobooks.app and I think it's trying too hard to look nice for something I plan on just updating and closing 95% of the time.

Getting to the point

Ok, so after going over some of the same problems that I was having with Lion. We had a Q&A session where he said that despite all of these issues he's looking forward to Mountain Lion.

I was actually a little suprised by this, but he said it with such sincerity that it actually hit me like a mini reality distortion field.

I was at peace.

Things are going to get better.

And then the wave was over and I felt like a storm trooper that just let an old man and a kid scoot on by with the droids that I was looking for.