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 ESTOne of Lion’s biggest new features is totally new Exposé. Exposé’s task is to help people navigate between windows on the desktop. Considering that most of us often have more windows open than we can actually fit on the screen, a feature like Exposé has been very useful. With Lion, Apple has decided to take Exposé one step further and it now goes by a new name: Mission Control.
While Exposé was strictly limited to the apps open in your desktop (or one Space), Mission Control breaks the limits and adds Spaces into the mix. To simplify, Mission Control is just a combined version of old Exposé, Spaces, and the Dashboard.
On the top, you have your available Spaces (and remember, each full screen app you have open will show up as its own Space). You can easily add a new Space by taking your mouse to the top right corner and clicking. The center is taken by Exposé-like app switcher which groups all your open windows togehter by app. If you have for instance three Safari windows open, they will be grouped together. The bottom is taken by Dock, which shows you what apps you have open.
Mission Control isn't as simple as the old Exposé, and if you have absolutely no use for Spaces, then I can see why you would like to use the old Exposé instead. The old Exposé was better at switching between random windows while Mission Control does a better job of switching between apps thanks to its neater grouping.
There is one disadvantage compared with Exposé though: if you minimize a window into app icon in the Dock, that window doesn't show up in Mission Control. The only way I’ve found is to use the Application Exposé, which is still present, by right-clicking the Dock icon and selecting “Show All Windows” (or, if you have a multitouch device, doing a two-fingered double tap on the app's icon in the Dock). For me, this is a big setback as I used that feature extensively and it's now more difficult to take advantage of.
Some avid Spaces users might also prefer the old Spaces, as you could have the whole screen dedicated to switching between Spaces if you wanted. Now you only have roughly 20% of the screen for Spaces when in Mission Control. It can be hard to switch between Spaces because the thumbnails in Mission Control are so small that you can’t easily see what's in each one.
While it’s not a big surprise, the old Exposé and Spaces are dead so there is not an option to disable Mission Control and use them instead. It's possible that third party software will bring back the old Exposé and/or Spaces, but no announcements have been made so far.
I think Mission Control does great job for the people it’s aimed at: consumers. The average user most likely won’t need more than five Spaces, of which the majority will be full screen applications. For that use, Mission Control is brilliant. Personally, I never used Spaces with Leopard or Snow Leopard but I find myself using Spaces daily in Lion. In earlier versions of OS X, Spaces was a feature that was a bit hidden - there was no dedicated button for it and it didn’t feel as integrated as it does with Lion, and Spaces simply didn’t feel as easy to use. Mission Control integrates Spaces into OS X in a much more convenient way.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
106 Comments
View All Comments
VMFnet - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
I just installed Lion on a OCZ Vertex2 SSD and it still doesn't support TRIM. I guess support for this feature is limited to stock Apple SSDs only.Sapan - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
Thanks for the reply. It is a shame that there still is no TRIM support.In the mean time I would recommend checking out a 3rd party program called TRIM Enabler:
http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322
Though the program is designed for Snow Leopard it works for Lion, but they are making a new version for Lion.
mdlam - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
I love how these diehard Apple fans are trying to resolve their discomforting feelings of exorbitant expenditure to Apple byA: Unreasonably denigrating other competitive alternatives.
B: Exaggerating the usefulness of certain proprietary tools.
C: Empathizing with the company's goals/missions/values
All to resolve the realization that they are paying more money than what they are getting, which is...
A totally outdated OS made to look streamline
A pretty cool looking computer that uses tunnel fans (which are extremely loud) and likes to overheat.
I used Snow Leopard on my Mac Mini for about 2 months and hated it. I think people force themselves to like OSX just because their laptop looks cool.
Horrible graphics speeds. Their BEST video card that you can fit into a their $4500 Mac Pro, is a ATI 6500 series, which is like a 100 dollar card, and offers pathetic performance for gaming--I had a 6950 2gb and that was barely enough. You can argue that Mac pro's should be used for graphics design and other things and not gaming. If that's the case I don't see why they don't put a FireGL or other designer cards in. In any case, who buys a $4500 computer that comes with a bullcrap video card? Some people are IDIOTS.
mdlam - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
Edit: A $170 dollar video card, 6870 1gb...Which is a complete piece of garbage card that is 30% slower than the 5970 1gb. Guess how much the upgrade is? $200.Post is based off of cognitive dissonance theory
parlour - Monday, July 25, 2011 - link
Macs don’t seem to be the right choice for you. That’s alright. Just don’t claim that everyone else has the same needs as you.sjinsjca - Saturday, July 23, 2011 - link
The test with the SSD is intriguing but there's a possibility that the FileVault performance hit might be less in the case of a conventional hard disk.Reason: hard disks are slower than SSDs, so there would be more idle states in which the OS could be performing encryption/decryption tasks.
Worth a spot-check.
EnerJi - Sunday, July 24, 2011 - link
That's a great point. I'd also love to know if the performance impact decreases with an HDD.johnmacward - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - link
What annoys me is the fact that the recovery partition doesn't keep a copy of the Lion installer for instant re-installation - and with a bit of Apple magic even a copy that updates as the OS updates.A download each time is a possibly expensive prospect considering we all have data caps of some kind.
It also turns a reinstall into a shockingly long 4 hour job which is a major pain.
luca108 - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - link
Small detail, but in the review you said you could only launch Launchpad by clicking the dock icon or using spotlight, but you can also set it as a hot corner. This is what I personally do... top left corner set for Launchpad and I can quickly get in and out of it to find my apps and utilities.I'm not suggesting it's quicker than using an apps stack on the dock... actually, its the exact same. But it definitely is faster than clicking the Launchpad dock icon or using spotlight to launch it.
Thrakazog - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - link
Does anyone know if Lion extended trim support to 3rd party SSD's, instead of only the ones apple provides ?