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mattkime
>>- Dashboard is now several clicks away instead of one. I use the calculator widget all the time.

Two finger swipe to the left

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>>- Not sure if my scanner will work with it or not

have you tried plugging it in?

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>>- SMBX (Apple's proprietary replacement for the open source Samba) doesn't play well with older versions of Samba.

Super Mario Bros. X (SMBX) is a homebrew Mario Bros. engine project that blends elements from Super Mario 1, 2, 3 and World, with SMB3 physics. It contains an extensive point-and-click level editor that allows for the creation classic Super Mario Bros. styled levels. It is possible to create episodes using either the SMB3 or SMW styled world map, or using a Mario 64 style hub level that has the players collect stars to advance. The game is playable with a friend in the 2 player co-op mode, where the screen seamlessly splits and combines as the players separate and rejoin. Custom graphics and custom music can be imported into levels.

There are classic power-ups such as the Fire Flower, Tanooki Suit, Yoshi, and Kuribo's Shoe, but also new power-ups like the Ice Flower, The Billy Gun, and the Propeller Block. Besides Mario and Luigi, there are also Toad, Princess Peach and Link as playable characters.

Levels and episodes made in SMBX require the engine to play. Currently, there is no stane-alone option for distribution. SMBX is coded in Visual Basic.

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(vikm)
Why is Dashboard multiple clicks? Doesn't just one click pull it up from the Dock for you?

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threeprong
Personally, I can't stand the "Save a Version" approach that is now shown in Apple apps that run under Lion.

I just don't get that.

3P

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M A V I C
I'm not using a trackpad.

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mattkime

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M A V I C
I'm not using a trackpad.

nor am i!

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Ken Sp.
SpotLight can do calculations---just type in, and if you want the calculator-hit the enter/return key

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Ken Sp.
SpotLight can do calculations---just type in, and if you want the calculator-hit the enter/return key

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prymsnap
Brother MFC scanner function no longer shows up as a device in Image Capture.

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M A V I C
I've been using it for a month or so now. My complaints:
- Dashboard is now several clicks away instead of one. I use the calculator widget all the time.

My keyboard has a calculator button on it which works without configuration. It must be 12 years old by now and it is possibly the best-thought-out thing from Microsoft I've ever owned.

- Not sure if my scanner will work with it or not

Bet it will.

- SMBX (Apple's proprietary replacement for the open source Samba) doesn't play well with older versions of Samba.

Yeah, this was a big, expensive, stupid, problem. But my new NAS is a heck of a lot bigger, faster, and more capable than the old one.

Other than that, no issues for me.

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tenders

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prymsnap
Brother MFC scanner function no longer shows up as a device in Image Capture.

This was not my experience with a 7820N which is several years old. Image Capture pulls in the scanner beautifully. Is all of your software up to date?

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The UnDoug
I have a mOuse with a clickable scroll wheel, and when I click it, the dashboard (with calculator) pops up.

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M A V I C
- SMBX (Apple's proprietary replacement for the open source Samba) doesn't play well with older versions of Samba.

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Bimwad
. . . There is little in Lion, for me anyway, that I can't already do, and do easier and better than in SL.

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prymsnap

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tenders

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prymsnap
Brother MFC scanner function no longer shows up as a device in Image Capture.

This was not my experience with a 7820N which is several years old. Image Capture pulls in the scanner beautifully. Is all of your software up to date?

Yes, double-checked after reading your post.

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guitarist
I'm in agreement with the expert consensus here: I'm clinging to Snow Leopard until at least 2017, won't budge, none of this Lion baloney for me, no sir.

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threeprong
Personally, I can't stand the "Save a Version" approach that is now shown in Apple apps that run under Lion.

I just don't get that.

3P

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mrlynn
Is there anyone who likes Lion better than SL?
/Mr Lynn

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what4
Scollbars. I keep scrollbars on all the time, because I find that finger-scrolling using the trackpad simply does not work at times in certain applications.

The failure is erratic and unpredictable, but at times there simply is NO two-finger trackpad scrolling, period, but the scrollbar works.

I find that Lion has several such things that were not issues in Snow Leopard.

Not displaying window contents. The contents of a window sometimes do not appear. Then they sometimes appear if I click inside the window. Sometimes not.

Display of attached drives. External disks, flash drives, and CDs appear way at the bottom of the sidebar. I have found absolutely NO reason why these should have been moved from the top -- where I frequently used them -- to the bottom of the sidebar. There is no apparent option to change this.

Library folder invisible. As is well known, in Lion you have to take a special step to make the Library folder visible. Probably to protect us from ourselves, Apple made it invisible, which only means that experienced users just have to go to the trouble of Googling the problem and finding out how to solve it. Strange.

Symbolic links and aliases. Symbolic links and aliases are represented in Lion by the same symbol, even though they function differently in some important respects. This is another simplification that makes things more difficult for experienced users.

Over-large windows. Another Lion oddity is that it makes windows excessively large. Windows often fill the screen, or come close, when there is, say, a third of a screen's worth of content in them. This makes juggling multiple windows unnecessarily awkward, and I see no benefit from the larger window display. Indeed, the blank space in an open window is often positively useless, such as leaving a HUGE space to display short filenames, while not showing file date at all.

Delay. There is a delay in Lion that I didn't see in Snow Leopard, even though I am using Lion on a faster computer. Control-click something, delay, menu appears. Snow Leopard didn't have such a delay. That delay comes around at other times, but I can't recall them just now.

Overly subtle use of contrast. Lion must have been designed by young people with perfect eyesight, but I have trouble seeing certain things because the contrast is too low. For example, the horizontal scroll nub underneath a coverflow display of file contents -- it just disappears at times! And the scroll bars, when you turn them on, are teeeeeny! Apple needs to hire more designers who wear bifocals.

Erratic stuff. I can't identify just what this is, but once in a while Lion just DOES something erratic, weird, unexpected. For example, recently I tried to move a window and Lion selected the entire contents of my desktop, started opening every folder and file, then tried to replace Calendar and Contacts databases. Whoa! It took me 15 minutes to get things back to normal. Another time, Firefox just imploded. I had to replace it, delete some pref files, create a new profile and move the contents of the old one into it. Another time, Lion locked me out of my home folder, repeating only that I did not have permission to use it. Luckily, there was help via a web search.

Save As. Lion has done away with Save As in native apps like Preview, replacing it with Duplicate and Export. What The ----??? Save As is used almost universally in applications, and anybody who uses any application understands how it works. Except, now, in Lion.

I've run Lion on an early 2011 MacBook Pro with 8 gigs of RAM. I've run Disk Utility, Cocktail utilities, and DiskWarrior to make sure the hard drive is healthy. (These did help initially.) I've monitored Activity Monitor to make sure some hidden program wasn't hogging RAM and CPU. There is plenty of space on my hard drive.

Now, in conclusion, let me say that Lion is still OS X and that means it brings a great deal of functionality and grace -- though there have been times I thought Lion looked more like Windows than any previous OS X did.

I like this: A few minor improvements have been added to the way you can quick-view a photo, then click to open it in Preview. But you could already do this without quite the elegance.

All in all, I can't identify anything about Lion that makes me think of it as an improvement on Snow Leopard. I probably just don't use the features where the system has been improved, perhaps iPhoto, iChat, and some others I've never touched. I don't know who Lion is for. It's not for me. Indeed, for me, it's not as good as Snow Leopard.

If Apple is using Lion to to take us somewhere more wonderful, I can hardly wait to find out where that is.