I’ve had Lion for a while, now it’s time to complain

I installed Lion the day it came out, and I hated it. I tried not to rant about it too much and decided to give it a try for a while before judging. Maybe Apple is smarter than me.

For the most part, I like the idea of the new features, such as Mission Control and Full Screen Apps. Actually, I really like them. What I don’t like is that some built in functionality was removed (gesture to switch applications) and there are so many bugs, that using Mission Control in any logical manner just doesn’t work.

The #1 thing I want out of Lion: A developer that uses Lion with Mission Control and multiple desktops.

Some specifics on my problems …
Open Mission Control, which shows my Dock (I started hiding it in Lion). Click on an app in my Dock that is open and it doesn’t matter if I’m on the same desktop or not (happens in both cases). What happens? A different app gains focus. Not the one I just clicked. Seems like a major bug to me.

Use an app in full screen mode. Move mouse to bottom of the screen to bring up hidden Dock. Dock opens … sometimes. Sometimes right away, sometimes after waiting a bit, sometimes right after moving away, a lot of times not at all. I’d like the option to bring up the Dock in this way, but even if that wasn’t an option when in a full screen app, then follow that. This randomness is a huge pain.

Some other things I want …
Four finger swipe (left and right) for switching applications – They just pulled this one out of the options and now I have nothing assigned to this gesture. The application switcher was what I used the majority of the time when changing between apps. I tried BetterTouchTool at first but it was a little buggy. I also decided to give Lion a chance and maybe there was a better way to do things. I’ve adjusted to switching apps with Mission Control but I’m going to try BetterTouchTool again to hopefully get my app switching gesture back.

About the four-finger swipe … I went in to settings and found that swiping between desktops could be assigned to this gesture. I had this one disabled because I was using the gesture so much expecting the application switcher to show up that it was screwing me up. I still don’t have any desire for this functionality. I want to know where my swipe is taking me. This seems like I’d be going on an adventure to find the desktop I want. Mission Control will take me right where I want to go without a potential adventure.

Full screen Coda – Not an Apple issue, but with Parallels 7 supporting Lion (although $50 to get full support for a new OS is kind of ridiculous) it looks like Coda is the only app that I would use as full screen.

Dedicated desktops that disappear when not in use – Ok, I’ll make the last one an Apple problem. The reason I want Coda (and wanted Parallels) to be full screen apps are because they are two Apps that had their own desktop assigned to them. However, they aren’t open all the time, so there were empty desktops hanging around my Mission Control. iTunes was the 4th Space I had (that’s the two I mentioned along with my main desktop) in Snow Leopard, but that was full screen ready at launch for Lion.

Lion is just frustrating. Snow Leopard was solid, I loved it right away. Lion just seems lazy. I’m not surprised Apple shipped something with so many bugs, they have glaring bugs that they take forever to fix all the time on the iPhone. But usually, when it’s related to a major new feature, they polish it to make sure it’s adopted.

The next big launch for Lion will be iCloud. Which I sadly have to be excited for since iOS has things too locked down to make Dropbox useable for anything other than viewing on devices.

I’ll just be here, hanging my hopes on iOS 5 being wonderful.ikoni