Review: Apple Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion"

My head started hurting after the first hour of using Mac OS X Lion. Two words: inverted scrolling.

That's correct – Lion's default scrolling behavior is to scroll down when you swipe up on your multitouch mouse, and to scroll up when you swipe down, just like you would on an iPad.

This modification in scrolling clearly illustrates Apple's ambition with Mac OS X Lion, which was to make the Mac operating system more like the mega-popular iOS software powering not just the iPad, but also the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs previously said the company was learning lessons from the iPad and rolling them into its desktop operating system. The company envisions a future where PCs become more and more like mobile products, as they continue to get thinner, lighter, more battery-efficient and more dependent on online storage. Apple's Lion, MacBook Air and the upcoming iCloud online storage service symbolize the gradual convergence between PCs and tablets.

And while that all sounds great, some of Lion's iOS-like features scale up very well, while others behave very poorly in a desktop environment.

First, let me finish my rant about inverted scrolling. I wanted very badly to adapt to Lion's new so-called "natural scrolling" behavior, but I had to shut it off after two days because it just felt too awkward.

"I'm trying to use a computer, not play freakin' Golden Eye," I complained to a friend.

Inverted scrolling makes sense on an iPad, where you swipe the screen in one direction and it moves in the opposite direction, like a world globe does in real life when you spin it with your fingers. But on a Mac, I believe it's the disconnect between peripheral and screen that makes it less intimate than a touchscreen device, and therefore uncomfortable to replace traditional mouse gestures with the real-world swipe.

Same goes for side swipes, which control Spaces, Apple's screen-management tool that gives you multiple desktop screens to work with. The default behavior of side-swiping is: Take two fingers and swipe to the right, and the screen moves toward the left so you can view your Dashboard. If you happen to have an app open in full-screen mode, you can swipe to the left, which moves you to a Space to your right, to look just at that full-screen app. Again, this swiping behavior feels unnatural on a Mac, even though it makes perfect sense on an iPad.

All that said, it's easy to disable inverted scrolling in the system preferences. So this isn't a major issue, but merely an example of a bigger problem in Lion: awkward usability in some of the operating system's new interface tweaks.

I particularly didn't like Launchpad, another iPad-like element. Hit the Launchpad icon and boom – you've got a large grid of beautiful, huge icons, and you can select your app there. It looks almost exactly the same as the iPad's springboard screen.

Here's where a lot of Mac-hating trolls will swear that Apple chooses form over function: The Launchpad just doesn't work well with a mouse and a desktop device. Imagine how exhausted I got using Launchpad on my 27-inch iMac. My eyes had to dart across the entire screen, up and down and left to right, just to find the app I wanted to launch. And then I'd have to mouse over to click on the app.

By contrast, the experience on an iPad of finding an app and launching it with a tap is a lot quicker and more pleasant (though a 27-inch touchscreen would probably present issues as well). Ultimately, on a Mac, this experience felt tacky and inefficient, and I reverted to using the older view of my Applications folder as a list.

Another new interface-related feature is Mission Control, which has nothing to do with the iPad. It's basically an iteration of Exposé, the desktop-management tool that shrinks and spreads your applications all over the screen so you can switch between them easily – a feature I instantly fell in love with when it debuted in Mac OS X Panther.

Unfortunately, I can't say I feel the same about Mission Control, which not only shows your open applications, but also your Spaces. Mainly, it just looks uglier than Exposé did. What's with the small app icon hovering beneath each opened application? It seems unnecessary and, again, tacky.

With those complaints thoroughly aired out, one new Lion feature I really enjoyed was full-screen mode. Apple's built-in apps now have an icon you can click on in the corner – two diagonal arrows – which expands the application to take up the entire screen.

That may not sound interesting to you, but in an age where Facebook, Twitter and chat clients present never ending distractions, it's nice to hit a single button to filter out all the noise and focus on one task.

It's similar to the comfort of reading a website or using an app on an iPad: The content takes over the screen, and it's much easier to focus. That's what Apple was going for with full-screen mode, and this works. Programmers have the option to add full-screen support to any of their third-party Mac apps, which will be great.

Other than interface changes, Apple does offer a number of awesome goodies: AirDrop, Resume and AutoSave.

AirDrop is a simple utility for wirelessly sharing documents with nearby Lion users: Just drop a document on your friend's avatar, and it'll show up on his or her Mac. I tried this between an iMac and a MacBook Pro running Lion, and it worked in a snap.

The Resume and AutoSave features work together in an interesting way. Exit an application, and when you reopen it, it will pick up exactly where it left off. So if you're editing an image in Photoshop, for example, you can just quit the app and relaunch it, and your image will load with your latest edits. You no longer have to save before you exit! You'll love this if you lose work because you haven't been in the habit of saving frequently.

For the most part, Mac OS X is the same, solid operating system Apple customers have grown familiar with for the past 10 years. Some of the key iPad-like interface tweaks are ugly or nearly useless, but if you just disable and ignore them like I did, full-screen mode, AirDrop, Resume and AutoSave make this very affordable $30 upgrade worth your purchase.

And don't bother looking for this upgrade in a box – you'll be able to download OS X Lion instantly from the App Store.

WIRED Polishes the corners of Mac OS X: AirDrop, Resume, AutoSave, full-screen mode and upgraded Mail app are winning additions. Apple's visions of a future awash in gesture-based input devices, and the language we'll use when we get there, are being mapped out in plain view. The price is right.

TIRED Most of the iPad-like gestures don't translate eloquently to the desktop. Our brains aren't prepared to flip the script on scrolling. New Launchpad feature is confusing on Macs with larger screens. Mission Control is ugly; bring back Exposé.