OS X Lion: Macs' beginner-friendly days are over

Post by cmelbye » Mon, Jul 25, 2011, 10:35 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #16

cmelbye wrote: post #3

I'm not sure how he came to the conclusion that Lion isn't beginner-friendly anymore. The only reason it took him 20 minutes to get acclimated is because he's most likely been using advanced features of OS X (that were slightly changed in Lion) for years and it took him a little while to rewrite his muscle memory. I installed Lion on both of my parent's computers a few weeks ago. The only things they noticed that was…

First, I haven't used Lion yet. But from listening to Engadget it sounds as if they have made some rather confusing changes. For example, they point out that application-wide gestures are two finger and system-wide gestures are three finger. This strongly assumes that people know the difference. Based on convos I've had people don't. "Which version of Office are you using?" "XP". "Office XP?" "Umm, Windows XP?". "OK,…

Post by ugh » Mon, Jul 25, 2011, 11:02 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #42

ugh wrote: post #40

Lion doesn’t have any forced complexity. I just installed Lion on my parents iMac and they didn’t even notice (except for the new Mail app which they have no problem with). You don’t ever need to use Mission Control, you don’t ever need to use full screen mode, you don’t ever need to use Launchpad. (I reversed the scrolling direction and set it up to always display scrollbars. That’s it.)

So you can keep the old scrolling direction from SL? :-)

Post by ricardobeat » Mon, Jul 25, 2011, 11:35 PM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #33

alanfalcon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just curious, are you using Apple's Magic Mouse, or a mouse with a traditional scroll wheel?

Traditional scroll wheel. I love the Magic Mouse, but its flaky right click is a deal breaker..

Post by Udo » Tue, Jul 26, 2011, 6:58 AM UTC

stevenp wrote: post #4

I couldn't disagree more. I just gave my father (who has an iPhone) his first Mac and he had no idea where to find applications until I showed him the Launchpad. It's a feature I would never use, but it's accessible with a single button press or click and looks and feels just like the familiar iOS interface. Apple is doing something smart here. My guess is that more people have iPhones than Macs and they're betting t…

Post by Tichy » Tue, Jul 26, 2011, 6:25 PM UTC

ugh wrote: post #39

Tichy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So you tell them "swipe left or right with three fingers" and then they'll know" I hope this is not the only way to get out of full screen mode? I think it would have been the last thing I tried. And there are a lot of things you can try - "three finger swipe" is completely arbitrary, after all. I've been using a Mac for two years now, but I never learned any gestures and I would be screwed if they became mandatory.…

You can press ESC (which, I think, is universally the standard command for exiting full screen mode), you can mouse up to the menu bar and click the full screen button or you can use the shortcut that gets you into full screen mode to exit it again. I wouldn’t bother with gestures. I would tell my parents to press ESC. They know that button and they should already be aware that it is often used to exit full screen mo…