All Roared Out
I’ve used Lion and the previews of it since the first debut over a year ago. At least one machine has been running it since it then. For about six months I’ve used it on my primary development machine.
I’m letting you know, because the first reaction I hear to any Lion critique is, “it’ll feel better after you get used to it.” After six months I’m plenty used to it. It’s not better. In fact, I’m tired of it. I’m even tired of talking about it. It’s time to do something about it.
Starting today, I’m switching back any machine that I can to Snow Leopard. This is just for practical reasons: I’m much more productive when using Snow Leopard. But I can’t switch on my dev machines, so where possible I’m going to set preferences to disable Lion features:
- Hide the Launch Pad. It seems to have no purpose other to provide a limited, and oddly modal version of the Applications folder. It’s a place where adding iOS-ness was easy, but not a place where iOS-ness helped at all.
- Turn the application-is-running dot back on in the dock. Perhaps this info can be hidden someday in the future, but today it’s good to know which apps are chewing on your CPU.
- Re-reverse scrolling. I actually like reverse scrolling for trackpads, but my Lion machine will be a mouse-driven machine with a wheel. And on a wheel it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
- Re-enable scroll bars. I’m just tired of being lost in a sea of scroll-views. Devs: don’t you miss seeing the little tick-marks where your errors are?
- Stop using the infuriatingly buggy full-screen mode. I dare you to use Xcode, in a multi-window environment, in full screen. I double-dog-dare you!
- Go back to keyboard shortcuts. I’m tired of trying to memorize gestures. Is it 2 fingers or 3? Is it double-tap-swipe-up? Or pinch-tap-twist? When did power users decide they liked to take their hands off the keyboard anyway? No one sent me the memo.
- Put Safari tab opening back the way it was. The Last-In-First-Out ordering of Chrome tabs always felt like a reverse polish notation calculator: neato but impractical.
I’ll be keeping Mission Control. It’s really just Spaces 2.0 anyway. Sure would be nice if it responded to the keyboard AT ALL.
P.S. Does anyone know how to disable the spelling auto-correct? It’s driving me bonkers. Update: It’s in the Language and Text preference panel. Ahhh… feels better already.
