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.
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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.