Things that I like (or don't) about OS X Lion as a Windows user

While it was a PC dominated environment a few years ago at my work place, people have started to switch to Macs when they are allowed to choose their workstation. Now most of my co-workers use Mac as their main machine while their PC is still around as a backup machine, for testing, or for .NET development.

I was no exception to the trend. The initial reason that I switched from PC to Mac was OS X's nice Unix/Linux command line support. I often run Linux commands on web servers, and it is good to be able to run same commands between servers and my local development machine. You can still do most of those things on Windows, but it is not the same or as seamless an experience as provided by OS X.

Drupal's command line program, Drush, simply does not run very well on Windows. To get the most out of Drush's capability out of the box, it needs to run on Mac or Linux systems.

While Apple touts 250+ new features in OS X Lion (http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html), here are things that I like about OS X, and things I miss in it. Some are features that existed years ago in Windows.

Resizing widows from all corners

Coming from Windows, I was annoyed by not being able to resize windows from all corners and sides of the windows. It did not seem to bother long time Mac users, but it did many Window users including me. Was I glad when I found out that I could finally resize windows by grabbing any corner (except top right) and side!

Resume and sleep

Lion offers to remember open windows when you shut down the machine. This is quite a nice feature for me especially when I use Mac mini for development. I like to keep the continuity of desktop settings and open windows, and shutdown/reboot computer only when it is necessary; I put computers to sleep most of the time. I was happily surprised when sleep mode worked with Mac mini even after it was unplugged and taken to home. Even though it lost memory in the RAM, Mac mini was able to wake from sleep mode because Mac writes to hard drive as a back up when it goes to sleep mode.

However, somehow sleep mode did not work after I upgraded OS X Lion. But the shutdown feature with the option to remember the open windows was a saver to me, and it is as good as sleep mode. Even with Mac, an occasional restart of the machine is needed because memory usage will stay high and the machine will slow down with many open threads and processes running. Rebooting flushes the memory and does a fresh restart leaving the windows open, which gives me the continuity of my work.

Auto save

Related to the resume feature is Lion's system wide support for automatic save of documents. For example, if you opened TextEdit and worked with some text temporarily -- there is a case where you don't want to save the text to a file, but still want to keep it around for a while -- and close the program, it does not prompt me to save a file. It just closes and it brings the last text back when you run the program later.

Multiple desktops

OS X's multiple virtual desktops is a very useful feature out of the box. This may be one of the most wanted features among Windows users. This has been around from previous versions of OS X as Spaces and Exposé, now called Mission Control. I like that it allows me to view all open windows and then all open windows from a single program, for example, only windows from a browser but not else.

Instant preview

When you are searching for files on Finder (Windows Explorer counterpart), it shows the content of files in a preview pane. It does not work for every file type, but it's as a start I am happy to see previews of text files and PDF files. Not only does it show the first page of the document, but you can also see the whole document by flipping pages or by scrolling down. I hear you can even configure it to show code highlighted in the programming language.

Copying folders with same name

One feature that Windows users take for granted is the behavior of the OS when you copy a folder to another location where there is a folder with the same name. What I was expecting was to have merged content of both folders, but OS X replaces the content of the destination with source folder. I read a complaint from a user who lost giga bytes of data doing that. The worst part is that files removed that way do not go to trash bin to be recovered. Now Lion offers to replace or merge if you try to copy folder to a folder with same name.

However, it is still not quite the same behavior I expected as in Windows. It takes the change time of files into consideration and will pick the newer ones in the merge. I appreciate Lion's try to be smart at this, but most of the time what I want is just to overwrite destination with files from the source when there are files with same name. Lion's over protective behavior can cause unexpected results.

Missing middle mouse button

Apple took some time to adopt the right mouse button and may not get to the middle button at all now that buttons are being virtualized such as with magic mouse. The middle button was quite useful for me as I was able to map it to open and close a browser tab without using the keyboard. I tried to use hand gestures to do the same, but it is not the same without the third button.

Touch of Apple keyboard

This is probably a matter of getting used to, but the size of the keys of the Apple keyboard (newer aluminum one) makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Traditional keys have a tapered shape when viewed from the side and the actual area that fingers are touching is smaller. The size is about that of a finger so that you can feel the edge of keys, which provides more physical feeling and gives a better sense of where your fingers are.

Apple's keys are slightly bigger and fingers are less likely to touch the edge of the keys and more likely to get lost. If you are not an experienced typist, your fingers might get stressed out more easily by constantly fumbling around to position themselves correctly. I'd say the typing experience of Apple keyboard is more virtual and less physical. If you are good at typing on the Apple keyboard without feeling the edges of the keys, you'd be better off with the virtual keyboard on iPad.

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These are some points that I experienced as a new Mac user from the perspective of a long time Windows user. Some are features I love, some existed on other systems a long time ago, some I miss, and some I don't like. There is no perfect system. You just choose the one that is the closest to what you think as ideal. Then you may need to adapt yourself to some things. Many times the decision is emotional too. Some people would not try Mac at all just because they cannot stand the fact that there is no dedicated forward delete key on the Apple keyboard without numeric keypad.