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John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

arstechnica.com

141–150 of 222 posts

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#141
post #121

"It chose to attack the lowest-hanging fruit first, the one thing about Apple's development environment most likely to stand out as primitive and backwards to programmers coming from other platforms or even fresh out of school: manual memory management." ARC works great until you have cyclic references. Then you "just" have to add "Zeroing Weak References". Ok. Where? How do I know when I have to add them? The proble…

There are other forms of memory management than manual and refcounted.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#142
post #92

"Terminal also—finally—supports 256 text colors with its new xterm-256color terminal type." Woohoo! Finally a true MediumAquamarine comment-face in emacs in mac term.

Agreed, about time! Having to hack the terminal's prefpane to make my terminal colors work has been a total headache every time I upgrade or switch machines.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#143
post #95

I skipped about four pages from the middle of this review because it was just way too technical. I know he's an engineer and wants to cover these things, but I'm not interested in seeing so much coverage for something that very few people will get. It's not so much a review as it is an overview.

This is Hacker News, where it is generally understood that most people will have a fairly technical background (it's not called "Hacker News" for nothing). And the review is on Ars Technica, which also targets a technical audience. John Siracusa's reviews of new versions of Mac OS X are famous, as they provide all of the technical details that most other reviewers don't. I understand that's not what you are looking for, but that's what the target audience of Hacker News and Ars Technica wants, and I certainly appreciate it.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#144
post #137
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power users go with the "Combine when taskbar is full" option. Reduces clicks and hover times tenfold.

Power users go with the "Combine when taskbar is full" option. What sample size do you have here?

Me :)

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#145
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this has been one of the fundamental UI differences between Mac OS (from farther back than OS X) and Windows/Linux. Mac windows can only be resized from the bottom-right, with those other points being used to drag the window around.

I haven't owned an Apple since my old IIgs, but from playing around with friends' and Apple Store Macs, I always wondered if there was just a non-obvious way for powerusers to maximize Mac windows for an alt-Tab type window switching workflow. Now I know there wasn't. Was this ever a pain point for powerusers, especially on laptops, or did you just get used to it?

I rarely need to resize windows on any operating system and never understood the complaints about the Mac's behavior.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#146

Siracusa strikes me as a power user type so I'm extremely surprised that he neglected to mention how patently awful and useless Mission Control is on multiple monitors. Whereas in the Spaces view in Snow Leopard I could move a window to a different space AND a different monitor with a quick drag, Mission Control doesn't allow this - I have to first move the window to the correct "Desktop", then exit MC and drag it to…

wasn't ready in time and will be fixed for 10.7.1?

Don't know why you're getting down voted, seems to me this is the obvious reason (if not 10.7.1 then 10.7.x). These are clearly bugs, and I agree, they make these features kind of useless for me on my main setup. Prior to Lion I already used a "poor man's fullscreen" by manually making the windows these sizes on each screen. Was hoping this would make things better but instead made it infinitely worse.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#147

I'm disappointed in the answer to the following questions: Can I tile two windows without 17 clicks and mouse movements? Fortunately for the creator of Cinch, it seems the answer is no. Can I archive a gmail message? No?

I use Divvy for Mac for arranging windows. I love it. http://mizage.com/divvy/#divvyMac

Don't forget ShiftIt.

Completely Free and does everything divvy and SizeUp can do !!

A git repo, with latest chages based on

  https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt/network
appears to be here:

  https://github.com/mehowte/ShiftIt
Very easy to build with Xcode 4 on SL 10.6.8 ...

I'll be happy to upload a binary of the latest build I made last night for those in need (just ask).

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#148
I am in India, and have a connection that is 256Kbps. This is sufficient for most things, but I cannot get Lion from Apple.

I don't mind waiting for 40 hours for ~4GB to download, but the likelihood that a connection in India is sustained for more than 10-15 minutes is rather low. The problem here isn't with the speed (it is with that as well), but with the reliability of the connection. Even at 8MBPS, this download will still take about an hour and it's rare that the connection won't be randomly dropped during that hour.

Why can't Apple download these things smartly like BitTorrent? Why this behemoth of a download? Why not break it up into smaller pieces of ~10-20MB each, with a checksum for all these pieces so that WHEN (in India it's WHEN, not if) the connection gets dropped, you're only effectively losing 10-20 MB of downloaded data, not losing an entire GB or more of downloaded material. To me, it almost seems silly not to do this. Is Apple really this ignorant of flaky internet connections?

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#149

Having listened to Siracusa's 5by5 podcast, Hypercritical, I am reading this with the voice of Squidworth from Spongebob Squarepants.

Dan's been trying to get the rights to do a dramatic reading for at least a few parts of it. (Ars said no to him reading the whole thing, understandably.)

This week's episode should be awesome.

Re: John Siracusa's Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review

#150

I am in India, and have a connection that is 256Kbps. This is sufficient for most things, but I cannot get Lion from Apple. I don't mind waiting for 40 hours for ~4GB to download, but the likelihood that a connection in India is sustained for more than 10-15 minutes is rather low. The problem here isn't with the speed (it is with that as well), but with the reliability of the connection. Even at 8MBPS, this download…

Can you not find a less than legit copy and put in your key? I'm unfamiliar with the process by any standard.
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