Does anyone recommend OS X Lion?

You mean, "any system must be designed", not "design".

So, really? Is this true that every system must be designed to run at 100% CPU for years? Where od you get this from.

Thanks for the thorough reply.

Here are some more thoughts:

After 5 weeks using Lion on my new 27" iMac:

Hoping for improvement.

(The new system wants to much and delivers to little.

It is badly executed)

My wishlist:

User Interface

• design one visually coherent Graphic User Interface: Desktop and Applications. Please no Baby-Graphic like Address Book, Calendar, Photo Booth and the yellow memo with felt marker in Mail.
• Design one user interface logic and menus which is consistent and well thought through. Please no upside down logic like the gray bars for the ABC divider in Address book. Colored backgrounds in the desktop windows are for highlighting, not for dividers.
• Talk with Jonathan Ive about consistency.
• Make the scrollbars act the same everywhere.
• Please give more attention to the application icons: The MissionControl Icon shows all the problems of this application in the icon: The same chaos in the icon as in the mission control window.
• Fix the different column view problems: sort order control of the items, the width control of the columns.
• Reduce the amount of typefaces and sizes used. Now there seem to be new ones in Mail and Address book.
• Avoid the Microsoft-Disease: Please make the defaults meaningful for the first interaction with Lion. Corrections to the default should be easy for every user and not hidden in difficult-to-find places.

Versions/Autosave

• Autosave is a great feature.
• Restart the design process again for Versions. It collides with TimeMachine: Normal work should be possible in the "normal environment". Problems should be solved in the "emergency environment".
• Forget the Versions "universe history mode". Give us a way to go back to earlier versions of a file in the normal-work-mode.
• Give us a Save as menue-line.
• Give us Autosave in Mail.

Mission Control

• Give us an option to control Spaces and Expose separately.
• Give us controls to adjust Mission control to the complexity we need.
• Give us a background that matches the iMac design. Wallpapers were invented by Microsoft: This word should be avoided when we talk about user interface: It is not a wallpaper, but a background with a meaning.
• Give us an option to turn off each of the three areas: top-middle-bottom
• If only one Space is used, the spaces area should be turned off.
• Forget the application-icons in Mission control: it's disturbing pseudo-information.
• Linen is for beds, walls and sofas.

Dashboard

• Give us a dashboard icon in the dock that acts same like in Snow Leopard.
• Give me a possibility to assign the F4 key again for Dashboard and not for Launchpad, which is printed on the key. Now it seems to be impossible to change this.

Fullscreen mode

Well, I don't need it, but as I don't use it, at least it does not bother me.

Sticky notes

Please make the the close-box bigger. It is impossible to close the notes, because the pointer switches to resize on every edge immediately.

Address book

• The Lion design this bad-bad joke: Get some hints from the Snow Leopard Address book.
• Do away with the reduced functionality compared to SnowLeopard.
• Stop the Stupid Kiddy-Filofax mocking design with less functionality than a Filofax.
• Buy some Filofaxes and learn about information design.
• Bring back functionality and graphics in sync with the rest of the GUI of the System.
• Forget Grey ABC dividers: Colored backgrounds are for highlighting in the Desktop windows.
• Bring back 3-column view with Groups. I want to move people directly into groups, not through a multistep routine.
• Give us a simple sync from Mac to Mac.
• The Address Book designer should trace FiloFax calenders by hand with a pen for one year !

Calendar

• Improve the functionality of Calendar over the level of Snow Leopard.
• Give us a great Mac-design and not a Fisher-Price-Kiddy calendar with sloppy ripped off pages…
• GIve us back the calendar list, so I can see which calendar is open and which calendar I am working in .
• Give us a preselection of the calendar I want to work in, just as it used to be.
• New calendar events should appear in front of older ones and it should be easy to move and adjust them (not difficult, like now)
• Give us back the monthly small calendar in the lower left corner in the weekly view.
• The information windows always open up on the far left top corner of the screen. I can open two information windows on the same event, not good. Fix this. I want to be able to move the information window, so it appears in the same place all the time.
• Give us week numbers ! I use the calendar for more than dinner-dates !
• Give us a 3-months widescreen overview.
• Give us horizontal scrollbars to slide through the monthly view to see the last two weeks of this month and the next 2 weeks of the next month.
• The yearly view with the "temperature-indication" is plain dumb. Think of some information this view could give to me !
• The page-advance animation pokes me in the eye 50 times a day. Looking for the animation uncheck box.

Mail

• Give us Autosave in Mail.
• It took me weeks to find the menu to adjust the amount of lines in the list view. Can't find it again. Now I can display 25 mails on my 27". It is much better than before. The default should be 0 lines (which is actually 2 lines on the screen).
• Conversations is great.
• After all the tweaking and difficult adjustments, I think Mail is the best application in Lion.

Launchpad

• Launchpad just adds more noise. I want to be able to turn it off forever! It comes back to the dock after each restart.
• I want to assign Dashboard to the hard-key for Launchpad on my new keyboard (F4). At the moment the system pref will not accept this change.
• Rethink the "back to mac" concept.

Shut-Down

• Give us one System-Pref which controls "Startup items" and "Resume" in a meaningful way.
• Do away with the checkbox in the shut-down window.

Photo Booth

This should be a free app in the appstore. It is just too much Disneyland for a Mac. Should not be part of Lion.

Rosetta

• Let us download an application to use PPC applications in LIon.
• Don't tell us which applications we have to use. We can decide by ourselves.

From beta to alpha

Alex Zavatone wrote:

You mean "applications' and user's permissions", right?

Most of us here have made it past fifth grade. Using the apostrophe properly matters.

Plural possessive, it goes after the s.

Plural, it goes before the s.

Thank you.

From your last name you could be Italian. If so, congratulations. You've mastered the English language. Otherwise.. stattene zitto e impara a tua volta una seconda lingua straniera e solo poi permettiti di correggere gli errori di chi non è di madre lingua inglese.

Now feel free to go to Google Translation.

Three rounds of applause for dr. meguro. Take a bow – best post of this book-length thread and one that should be posted on Apple's front door.

Thanks. Bow.

Alex Zavatone wrote:

You mean, "any system must be designed", not "design".

So, really? Is this true that every system must be designed to run at 100% CPU for years? Where od you get this from.

Where od you? It is "where do you", bambino. See? It always happens! Correct the others and you make a mistake yourself. That's the divine punition for the dumb speelling checkers.

Regarding your question it is you that should explain why a CPU running a long time at 100% should fail. Because of overheat? Not a chance. That would mean the heatsink is not properly designED. What matters is not the CPU usage but the CPU temperature. As long as the CPU stays below its maximum allowed CPU temperature it is fine. If having a constant CPU usage at 100% was a problem, some mechanisms had to be implememented to avoid such situation. And guess what? There are none. Since ever Unix systems have been designed to support a load average higher than the number of CPUs (or cores, now). To have an high load average (more than 1 for each CPU/core) is not efficient but it's a way to share limited CPU resources to more processes and users. The CPU runs at 100% and some processes are waiting into queues for their turn to be executed. And yes, such a situation where the resources are limited can go on forever without having any worry about the CPU health. Because it is working as designed.

The fact that a personal computer during a casual usage should rarely have an 100% CPU usage is a complitely different story. Still when it happens the CPU should not suffer. If it does the CPU was faulty already. If I want to run very CPU intensive applications for scientific calculations on any machine without worrying I must be able to do so. And scientists do it indeed.

Michelasso, thanks for the iState graphic. That is impressive. But SL isn't producing roller coasters for me on either my Pro or my Air. Seldom does. Again, that's computing for you, every ride is unique. Until you read the comments across the Web, you can't really know what's happening generally from personal experience.

As for Siracusa's article in ARS TECHNICA, he wrote it just days after the release of Lion. You know the press, always trying to get a scoop. Such rapid-fire reviews might be necessary to help people head off downloading defective software, but they also risk a Type II error of missing things that should be brought to the attention of people except that they take a week or two weeks to show themselves.

On ARS, on Macworld forums, and here, the same pattern shows: initial euphoria over Lion, then gradual discovery of small anomalies, then people rushing to defend Apple, then discovery of serious problems, then other people rushing to defend Apple (fewer in number), then more profound questions raised about Lion and its introduction, then the conversation tends to divide into a bunch of streams, some handy tips, others resignation and going back to SL, others crossing their fingers waiting for 1.7.1 initially and now 1.7.2, mocking Windows users, and lastly people ruminating on the future of computing.

Kind of like those medieval tryptichs where people take various approaches to the end of the world and the Second Coming, an apt analogy in retrospect.

Siracusa's article was so early in the cycle, it preceded 98% of the conversation. Well written but as the comments increasingly pointed out, very rah-rah and not sufficiently analytical. A lot of the commenters noted that "Lion" isn't a name you give a minor upgrade, nor one that for a lot of users takes the beloved Mac interface on a weird iPhone-inspired sideways hop rather than clearly forwards in terms of computing.

Punition?? 😝

The fact that a personal computer during a casual usage should rarely have an 100% CPU usage is a complitely different story. Still when it happens the CPU should not suffer. If it does the CPU was faulty already. If I want to run very CPU intensive applications for scientific calculations on any machine without worrying I must be able to do so. And scientists do it indeed.

Thanks for the elaboration. SL on my mid-2009 MPB seldom uses more than 20% on either processor, and that's high for my machine. Occasionally when there's a memory leak or some super-intensive work going on, like using the venerable Visual Hub, a 2007 PPC-based application still the best for graphic file conversions, it crawls up to the high-40% range, but anything else is a broken application. This was also true for my early-2010 Air and is again now that I've reinstalled SL on it.

Not being that kind of a scientist who consistently is running his machine at the highest limits of endurance, I just want a hardware-software combination that isn't going to turn my computer into a nuclear pile. That sadly wasn't my experience with Lion on the Air.

There's a little more about this on a branch of the Forum topic, "Horrible MBP Battery Life":

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?start=0&tstart=0

Worth skimming and it's "only" 40+ pages. In the vast computing universe, on the edge of the Mac galaxy, we are not alone.

Thanks Doc. I'll pay attention to that list you put together. I'm collating my list as well.

Gratzie. I do hope that when I mess up in Italian, you will correct me. Sorry if I sounded grumpy, as I just finshed telling a bunch of lazy Americans how to use the apostrophe. So, please accept my apology for the condescending "fifth grade" remark.

Way too many Americans, who are supposed to learn just ONE language well, refuse to do so.

Anyway, my family's back in Bergamo, Varese and Rasa di Varese. Think I was back in Lago di Guarda dieci anni fa.

Now, on to the meat of the issue - I was wondering if what you mentioned is actually part of the design and testing of the hardware where it is put together at Foxconn.

Well Alex, let me save you some time on that list.

To summarize the long statement of dr meguro:

"Let me keep my Snow Leopard, make it a little more consistent, make it a little better with autosave, mail-conversation and a better calender with weeknumbers and 3 monthoverview, and i'll be happy as ever.

(oh, and fullscreenmode is allowed as well, because I don't use it anyway, but it does not bother me either)"

You can post this revolutionairy message on Apple's front door, but I don't think they will be very impressed.

(and it's not gonna change anything for that matter).

(I try to edit the post carefully, or I get corrected on that and we get a discussion about Dutch and English here as well - we would not like that, now would we ?)😉

Hi Emilia,

If your Finder Prefs for a window won't "stick" it could be your Finder Prefs that are corrupt. You could test this by creating a new user account, logging into it and chaning some window view settings.

Since I don't know you level of expertise, instead of saying: throw out the Finder Prefs, I'll give you a step by step:

1. In the Finder Hold down the Option key, whil selecting the Go Menu
2. Choose the Library
3. Navigate and open the Preferences folder
4. type "Finder" in the search box (upper right hand corner of the Prefs window).
5. (If you haven't changed the Finder Prefs>Advanced to search the current window) Select "Preferences" as your search scope.
6. Trash (command-delete) all the com.apple.finder.plist files(This will wipe out all you custom settings for the Finder)
7. Minimize your Preferences Window.
8. Reapply all your settings. And they should Stick.

For the Curious: The Window settings are stored in the finder.plist and are viewable with the Property List Editor (Included in Apple's Developer tools) under Developer/Applications/Utilities) or you can try

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/14363/plistedit-pro

In either case you should be able to see that WindowState stores all your settings for how Finder windows appear.

softwater wrote:

Punition?? 😝

Punition!!

But I must admit, this time I've got lucky. Still, it usually works when anglifying Italian words with a Latin base. 😀

Bob, don't get me wrong. I wrote indeed that "The fact that a personal computer during a casual usage should rarely have an 100% CPU usage is a complitely different story". We were discussing why having the CPU always running at 100% should not cause any failure.

Again, you saw how Lion performs in my old MB. That is much better than what I was used in SL. It's true that after installing Lion I did a lot of maintenance to clean the account, remove old applications and the like. I also reinstalled Lion from scratch, but that's what I have always done with all OS X upgrades.

One thing tho. Just for testing you may want to install Lion in a external USB disk. It's possible making an USB key for Lion installions. Check: Lion DiskMaker. I nearly creates an USB/DVD installation disk by itself. With a clean OS you may see if you are still having problems.