Or, Why I Want My Leopard Back

When Apple released the latest edition of their operating software, Mr C declared we needed a beta tester. Seeing as he was working on some quite finicky pieces of software, and I was more into browsers and word processors, the honour fell to me. I wrote a post about my initial thoughts moving from Snow Leopard to Lion, and now I’m updating that with reasons I wish I hadn’t.

1. Chrome crashes more regularly. I made the switch from Firefox to Chrome a while back and whilst the Google browser was always a little bit more prone to crashing, it had never been as bad as it is now. Quite often, I can be in the middle of something and it all just goes away. I thought the point of Chrome was that each tab was independent, but apparently that is not the case. Also, and even more annoyingly, there are regular DNS fails on all browsers - briefly but often. Open a tab, go to website, and it doesn’t exist. Is it down for everyone or just me? It’s just me! Refresh, oh yea, so it is. Repeat ad nauseum.
2. The Mac way of life has always boggled my marbles a little bit, particularly the idea of closing windows and the program still being open. Now, I can be shutting windows and shutting the whole computer down and when I open it up, random windows are popping up that I thought I’d closed - things I don’t even remember opening. It’s me, I know it’s me, I just can’t get my head round it. But Jobs was always going on about how intuitive these things are meant to be and IT ISN’T.
3. I know I mentioned the Case of the Missing Logic Buttons in the last post, but it is a real flippin’ nightmare.
4. Also on Logic, it’s always been less keen on opening up two projects. It brings up a window suggesting you might want to close the existing one. Perfectly fair. I rarely need two open. Except now, I get a scary looking error saying the episode file cannot be opened at all. When you shut the existing one, it opens fine, so the error message is lying. And it’s a particularly mean lie when you are starting up a big file that you really need not to be broken. Like an enormous podcast file or something.
5. The Autosave thing is really quite irritating. I do trust it to do the saving, but it makes the feature formerly known as Save As a process with rather more steps. It also means if you go away from a Pages file and return to start typing, it takes a minute to catch you up. Quite often, I’m losing the start of my sentences because I didn’t realise it was paused. Oh, and there’s a weird message that appears asking me to unlock a file if I haven’t used it in more than two weeks. Surely it is my business when I last used a file, not Lion’s.
6. Pixelmator is essentially one giant headache now. Occasionally, it used to be a bit slow when resizing a big file. Now, it will crash frequently, if you drag in a picture, the selection square is nowhere near the picture you’ve dragged in. It’s off up and to the right all by itself, and you have to resize the actual Pixelmator window to get it to correct. Occasionally it gets carried away when you are resizing or clicking and things start happening as if you have clicked in a million different places, and really… it’s just not a fun product anymore. This may not be Lion’s fault, it may be Pixelmator’s, but it wasn’t like this on lovely Leopard.
7. Finally, the App Store - the very place where Lion came from - is horrendously slow. It takes a good couple of minutes to load, leaving you staring at white spaces and prices without knowing what goodies lie in store. I thought the App Store would make me more likely to check for updates - a process I despise - but at the moment, I actively avoid it.

This may all sound like I’m moaning, and quite frankly, I am. Lion is usable and I can get what I need to do done but it’s not an easy or pleasant process. Lion has brought me nothing useful, and made lots of things just a tiny bit worse.

Note: Upon hitting publish, after writing this delicious rant, Wordpress died because of a DNS lookup failure. Cheers, Lion.