moeffju.net

Mac OS X Lion Beta

21 Jul, 11

So, I upgraded to OS X Lion today against my better judgement, and I have to admit, I like Lion. It is a pretty nice beta version of an operating system. Here are some of the bugs and annoyances I encountered only today:

• Lion wakes much slower than Snow Leopard
• Lion does not wake on Touchpad touch, only on click or keypress
• The lock screen always runs your screen saver, and there is no “Blank Screen” screensaver
• The keyboard illumination stays on sometimes after unlocking the computer or showing the user switching screen
• When waking up the computer via timer, it goes back to sleep after a few seconds if there is no user input
• Spotlight sometimes hangs for up to 30 seconds (this is after it is done reindexing everything)
• The gcc in Xcode 4.1 produces segfaulting code causing my rvm-compiled Ruby to die several times
• Natural scrolling, seriously?
• The new gestures break my workflow in all kinds of ways. Before, I used BetterTouchTool for things like Four Finger Swipe Up, this is now broken. Also, two-finger scroll/swipe for scrolling and flipping pages (back/forward)? What were they smoking?
• Launchpad is completely useless for me, and I don’t see who the target user base for this is. Even my parents figured out to click the “Applications” icon to access applications
• Mission Control. Enough said.

Updated with more bugs and annoyances:

• Terminal opens new tabs with the same directory as the current tab. Some might like this, for me, it breaks my workflow. Luckily, there is a preference (Terminal, Startup tab)
• Preview crashed on every run with a SIGILL error because it could not create the Sandbox context. Turns out it didn’t like that my Downloads folder was symlinked to another harddisk. Removing and re-creating(!) the symlink fixed the problem, as described on Apple Forums

End update.

But the single most unexpected thing so far has been the new “character picker” feature. If you hold down a key, instead of repeating the key as you would expect from 20 years of personal computers and video games, it does this:

There is no UI to disable this behavior. Luckily, there is a preference, so open your Terminal and run this:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

This disables the character picker, but it does not immediately re-enable key repeat. You need to reboot for that.

The preference still says “Delay Until Repeat”, of course, even though it does not actually repeat the key pressed.

Oh, Apple.

Das Verbrechen der Soziologie

22 Aug, 07

WTF, WTF, WTF?