Combine Fullscreen and Resume for a productivity boost….

As I noted in my first thoughts on Lion, for me at least, the biggest battle in productivity is simply having a given task stuck in front of me. Today’s post is just a quick tip: say (for instance) you’ve been meaning to update your blog more often. Open up the management page for your site, put it in fullscreen, and leave it open. It is now always there, just off to the side — and if you’re anything like me, that means it gets dealt with.

So where does ‘resume’ come in? Close the browser, restart the computer — it comes back, just as you set it up before. It’s great … you can’t get away from it.

Ever.

Same works for Xcode — anything with a fullscreen mode. Lion’s going to be great. Exhausting, maybe, but … great.

First thoughts on Lion

So, Lion. Two days in, there are features I can hardly remember living without. The fullscreen app implementation is great, drawing the single best part of the iOS experience onto the desktop. As a writer, I can’t wait for my Screenwriting software to support it. Just tap the icon at the top of an app, and everything else goes away, even the menus. It’s interesting that something so simple can be as effective as it is — all the distractions that got in the way before are still there, just a swipe away, but putting them out of sight makes it much easier to focus on a task. Out of sight really is out of mind.

Launchpad, Lion’s implementation of the iOS grid of apps, is interesting in concept, and might be a boon for new users already familiar with an iPhone. But, as others have pointed out, it is redundant on the desktop, where the dock already does the same job better, filtering out all of the garbage on the typical computer.

The experience of Lion at this stage is still a little frustrating, however. A major overhaul of the interface, the main goal of Lion has been to streamline the way you use the computer, continuing the longterm Mac OS project of simply getting out of the way. Which makes it all the more jarring when you encounter issues like Launchpad sticking between panes of apps, and instances where the OS can’t seem to decide which of its many gestures you were aiming for. Several times now I have tried to swipe between fullscreen apps, and instead ended up stepping back through my browser history. I have actually had to turn off the pinch gesture to bring up the Launchpad, as it was just too unpredictable.

One of the more controversial changes in Lion is the switch to ‘Natural’ scrolling – that is, Lion defaults to iPad style scrolling where you pull pages up and down as though dragging a piece of paper. Most old users first action in Lion seems to have been to turn this ‘feature’ off. I decided to give it a day or two, and I’ve already gotten used to it. I can’t really say that it is an improvement, or any more ‘natural’ than the old way, but it isn’t any worse either once you’ve gotten a hang of it.

The single largest frustration with Lion so far also happens to be the only one that has no chance of ever being fixed: the removal of Rosetta. Rosetta, Apple’s legacy support for apps written in the old PowerPC days, was bound to go sometime, but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept that my old, perfectly functional copy of Adobe’s Creative Suite CS2 will no longer work. As Apple pushes on into the future, it is a little ironic that I’m going to have to leave a partition on my hard drive with Snow Leopard indefinitely.

Lion seems set to be a great revision of the OS, especially once the wrinkles are ironed out. Old software that doesn’t work anymore will eventually be replaced or upgraded, and I’ll forget about it in time. That seems to be the way of life under Apple.