It’s cheap, the installation was smooth and effortless, and it contains a few welcome refinements to the operating system. On the other hand there is a worrisome trend towards the removal of complexity from Apple products in general …
Just finished a 3-day narrative shoot in Vancouver and decided to install the new OS X Lion, released on Wednesday. Since most filmmakers are using Macs, I thought I would briefly report on my first impressions, along with the current state of compatibility with some of the more common software tools.
As with any OS update, there is bound to be some initial problems with software and driver incompatibility, at least until all vendors have released patches to their products. And as you’ve probably heard, Apple has done away with support for Rosetta – so any applications or plugins that requires PowerPC emulation will no longer run.
The upgrade was effortless, just open the App store and click install… and then wait.
Overall this appears to be a minor update, with a handful of features you may or may not end up using. Most apps can now be resized by dragging from any corner. Hitting Cmd-Shift-F will enter into a Full Screen mode for many apps, moving menu bars and other OS clutter out of the way so that you can concentrate on your work.
Scrolling now works a little differently, and you’ll probably immediately notice that using the scroll wheel on a mouse moves content in the opposite direction, to conform with the new touchpad gesture techniques (although this behaviour can be disabled in the system settings). Scroll bars in some web apps are suddenly behaving rather poorly; I am finding it difficult to click-and-drag a scrollbar within WordPress without using the mouse wheel or touchpad.
Mail, calendar, and address book have been totally revamped, and Airdrop lets you effortlessly share files with other Macs close by without having to setup file sharing.
OS X now mounts, reads, and writes directly to/from Windows NTFS volumes without having to use any 3rd-party drivers. I actually recommend you uninstall any NTFS driver (NTFS-3G, Tuxera, Paragon, etc) before doing the Lion update, or else these now-unnecessary drivers will throw mounting errors upon reboot.
As for photo/video application compatibility, Canon DSLR shooters may notice that the current version of the Canon EOS Utilities (v2.10.1 as of today) no longer runs. This might be a problem if you use a laptop to control your cameras, or to apply custom color profiles, etc.
Bummer. Canon seems to update these applications fairly regularly, so let’s hope a fix is in the works.
Cinema Tools now crashes for me on launch. Not good – although I suspect I simply need to run an update, or reinstall it altogether, since I could not locate other reports of incompatibility. Logic Pro 9.0 also would not start – although it will when updated to 9.1.x. I also understand Adobe Reader is not currently running on Lion, although I do not have this installed, since I usually just use Lion’s built-in Preview to view PDFs.
The new Launchpad feature seems interesting, and seems to be an attempt to make Macs more iPad-like, but it ends up coming across as a Microsoft Vista-like trend towards dumbing down the user interface. The good news is, all of the previous Finder features are still available, and Lion does not completely force you into using the new navigation elements.
I tested most of my other applications without any problems. This includes most Adobe CS5 applications (Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects, Premiere, Dreamweaver, etc), Final Cut Pro 7, Final Cut Pro X (aka iMovie Pro), Compressor, REDCINE-X, Magic Bullet Looks, MPEG Streamclip, JES Deinterlacer, Oracle OpenOffice 3, Oracle VirtualBox, Rosetta Stone 3 (the language app, not the PowerPC emulator), Final Draft 8, and Tweetdeck.
As for performance, I noticed a slightly improved boot time, with applications performing as expected. Note that there is an initial CPU run-up period for an hour or two after install, while Spotlight re-indexes all of your files and content.
Overall, Lion is a decent minor update. It’s cheap, the installation was smooth and effortless, and it contains a few welcome refinements to the operating system. On the other hand there is a worrisome trend towards the removal of complexity from Apple products in general (i.e. animated touchscreen-inspired interfaces, FCPX), which may ultimately upset many power users and professionals.
Update 08/26/2011: All 2010 Macbook Pro owners should exercise caution when updating to Lion. Many users are reporting a range of serious performance and stability issues related to Lion and NVIDIA graphics drivers, and no known fix is available as of today, other than total laptop replacement. I recommend researching any potential issues with your model before upgrading (I have a 2009 model so I seemed to have lucked out). There are a number of related discussions on the Apple support forums, and other tech sites on the web.
Were you able to resolve your Cinema Tools issue? Same problem here.
@Jarrard Cole: Not yet. Honestly it has not been a priority at the moment, since I am in the process of moving away entirely from the FCP suite, and likely switching to either Adobe Premiere or Avid.
Sorry if that is not particularly helpful; I just cannot personally trust FCP to stay relevant in the future, since the botched release of FCPX.