11.05.2011

Lion highlights, caveats and first impressions


I finally switched to Lion!

Highlights:

  1. Lion incorporates new gestures that are similar to iOS. The most obvious and pesky change is the scroll behavior. In the old OS, a two-finger downward drag caused the screen to scroll UP. In Lion, this gesture now causes the page to scroll DOWN, that is, it simulates what happens on a touch screen. This is actually more intuitive, but I've been used to the reverse scroll.
  2. Using three fingers to swipe left or right causes a page to turn. In a browser like Chrome or Safari, this gesture becomes Back and Forward commands, respectively.
  3. There's also a new icon on the upper right corner of applications. Clicking it makes the app occupy the whole screen (just like in iPad or iPhone). Could these change be hints that touch screen is coming to Macbook and iMac?
  4. The Lion download took one night (I'm based in Metro Manila), on a DSL line during a holiday (read: people in holiday = less sharing in bandwidth). I'm wondering where the Lion installer is now saved in my Macbook (if at all).
  5. Lion installation took about an hour (probably less). I just told the installer to continue, stood up and went out to lunch. When I returned, I found the new prompt waiting for me. Then it asked me to configure iCloud. This produced some headaches for me, which I will discuss next.
Caveats:
  1. iSync disappeared. This was an annoyance for me because I rely on it to sync appointments and contacts with my Nokia E51. I had to restore the iSync app from a Time Machine backup. (Or read this tip from the Apple forum.) Be sure to back up your Calendar and Address Book data before starting this procedure. 
  2. After restoring iSync, I tried synching my data, but I got two new problems: (a) iSync apparently re-sent my phone contacts to Address Book, causing double entries, and (b) Calendar refused to sync, giving me this error: "No writable calendar was found...". After googling and mucking about, I found the solution -- I only needed to create a new local calendar by clicking File > New Calendar > On My Mac.  
Important notes. It turns out problem 4b happened because Lion moved all my local calendars to iCloud (yikes!). So when I did another sync, my phone now sent its calendar data to my Macbook, causing more double entries. I still have not moved to resolve this problem, but my plan is to just change the sync settings so that the next sync will delete data in my phone, then copy the data from the Macbook back into the phone.

It's a good thing I activated iCloud. By default, this uploaded my contact and calendar data to iCloud. So when I made a nearly fatal mistake, I simply restored the data from iCloud.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for your helpful post. I had the same problem with iCal after upgrading to Lion. Did you fix the double entries problem? I'm having that problem and don't know what to do. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry for a very late reply. Yes, I had to use just one iCloud account. Mac took care of synching Calendar on all devices. That was in theory. There were times that my entries would disappear because iCloud was quirky.

    ReplyDelete

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