Back to the Mac: OS X 10.7 Lion Review
by Andrew Cunningham, Kristian Vättö & Anand Lal Shimpi on July 20, 2011 8:30 AM ESTAnother of Lion's much-hyped features is Resume, the ability of the operating system and of individual apps to restore themselves to their last-opened state. Unlike Versions, support for Resume doesn't appear to require any effort on the part of developers.
When shutting down or logging out, the OS will now offer to reopen your windows when you next login - you can opt not to, but the option is enabled by default.
Individual apps will now do the same thing - if you quit Word or Preview with items open, all of those items will reopen the next time you launch the program. This is only optional to a degree - there's no way (as best as I can tell) to disable resume for an application for a single instance as you can do with the OS. Your options are limited to enabling/disabling Resume for the entire user account using the control found in the General control panel.
OS X stores information about application states in each user's profile, specifically in the now-hidden Library folder. Navigate there and open the Saved Application State folder, and you'll see folders for storing the states of every app you've opened on your Mac.
As with many of Lion's features, whether you like Resume will probably depend on how you work. In certain situations - crashes and restarts due to updates, for example - it's convenient to have all of your windows spring back open. Resuming individual apps was a bit more annoying - I actually like getting a clean slate when I reopen programs, so I found myself pressing command-W a bunch of times to close windows before I'd press command-Q to quit the program.
The main trouble for me is that all of your windows re-open whether you're just launching the program from the Dock or whether you're trying to open a specific file - I'd double click a Word file and get four different documents open at once instead of the one I actually wanted.
At best, Resume makes restarting your computer less troublesome than it once was. At its worst, it encourages and enables bad user behavior - the sort of people who will appreciate Resume the most are the same people who leave dozens of unused windows open in the background at all times, sucking up RAM and slowing down their computers. I can't tell people how to use their computers, but I can scold Apple for helping people use them poorly.
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steven75 - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
"The fact is Windows/Office is really only expensive if you are building your own computers and installing your own OS"You seem to be implying that Office comes free with a pre-built computer when it in fact doesn't ever.
anactoraaron - Sunday, July 24, 2011 - link
wrong. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but when office 2010 came out my local office depot (and likely every office depot) had at least one pc with the full version of office 2010 on it. It was some kind of promotion they ran for about 2 weeks.tipoo - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Apart from the new animations in Safari, is performance improved any? Any word of it getting GPU acceleration?name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
My experience was that it ran the IE Paintball demo 25% faster, and the end result showed no visual artifacts. So, an improvement on 5.0, but still nothing like the HW acceleration performance of IE.On the other hand, I've yet to encounter a site (apart from the IE demos) where this actually matters...
name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Oh, it also, if you care, has elementary support for MathML. To be honest, however, the support is REALLY limited. The typography looks like crap, and anything even slightly fancy looks even worse --- eg long bars over symbols, large surds, etc.tipoo - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
Thanks. Yeah, its GPU acceleration doesn't seem as expansive still as other browsers, judging by canned benchmarks I've run it through. IE9 and FF5 are still far ahead in GPU acceleration, Chrome and Opera are getting there, Safari 5.1 is still last.EnzoFX - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
I think it's pretty unfair to compare Windows full-screening to Lion's. Full screening in Windows is not a feature at all IMO, it is the equivalent of dragging the window size out to the size of the screen. You do not gain any functionality whatsoever (usually just a lot of empty space, which was never in Apple's radar before). This kind of full-screen functionality has been present in OS X long before Lion, though it was often more manual, having to drag the window size out.But as you say, Apple has added functionality and it's become it's own separate feature. I think the comparison is pointless.
SmCaudata - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
True full-screen in Windows only happens with games, certain video players, and select other apps. I personally so no use for full-screen for most computer applications.Also, the comparison is valid because even in those areas where Windows does use full-screen, the other display still works. I can have a full-screen movie on one monitor while I do whatever I want on the other.
I really fail to see how Apple's implementation has "added functionality" that didn't exist in other OSes before. The article talks about using gestures instead of minimization... isn't that what Alt+Tab and Win+tab already did?
There are certain things that Apple does do well. Their dock was something that MS obviously took inspiration from for W7. This implementation of full-screen seemed pretty limited IMO.
name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
I suspect that the multi-screen hiccups with full-screen are purely temporary.We have seen problems like this before --- for example when multi-user GUI support (the rotating cube thing, to allow new users to log in to a mac) was first added, it didn't take long to discover that various iLife apps didn't behave properly. (I forget the details, but I think both iTunes and iPhoto wouldn't launch for the new user.)
It's one of the drawbacks of Apple being so secretive, even internally, that you get these sorts of crossed signals. But the issues usually get fixed, and if they are very visible, they usually get fixed soon.
I'd say, right now, the appropriate response is to assume this is a screwup, not go into conspiracy theory mode about how this is a plot by Apple to eventually remove multi-screen support.
Uritziel - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
LOL. As if a company spearheading Thunderbolt would aim to remove multi-screen support.