OS X Lion (10.7) brings a number of changes, presumably inspired by the fact that Apple’s touchscreen devices have been so popular. After an afternoon’s use, I am under the impression that a future generation of tablet computers will run this a convergence of this and iOS. By that time, I will not be using OS X as my main operating system.

Things I don’t like about OS X Lion

Spaces. The concept of multiple desktops has been a staple of my computer usage since before Apple cribbed the idea from Linux. In a previous job, I used an Ubuntu-powered computer, where I discovered spaces and how much easier they can make your computing life. Until today, I ran a 6-desktop configuration in two rows of three desktops. I did this so that I had quick access to Desktop 4 (web browsers) from Desktop 1 (text editor) and quick access from Desktop 1 to Desktop 2 (databases and terminals). If you’re interested, 3 is virtual machines and image editing, 5 is IM clients, notes and RSS and 6 is iTunes and stuff I don’t really touch regularly.

Apple has completely removed the ability to configure Spaces with Lion. You get one row of desktops and that’s it. This completely cripples my usage of the concept. I can access web browsers and terminals from text editors, but then I have to skip through two spaces from an IM client to get to a web browser. I seriously cannot justify – further than wanting a nice, pretty, single line of desktops in the abortion that is Mission Control – this decision. It’s completely ridiculous!

Spaces also had a cool little feature where you could view your whole grid from way above, then invoke Exposé and move individual windows between desktops. This, too, is totally gone. In order to view a desktop’s open windows, you have to invoke Mission Control whilst said desktop is selected.

Mission Control suggests to me that Spaces and Exposé had a child and found out that they were cousins when it was already too late to terminate the poor, unfortunate bastard.

Scrolling has now been inverted. To scroll down, you sweep up; to scroll left, you sweep right. Disabled (it didn’t instinctively occur to me that Apple would allow you to disable this. My past, PC-using self would be very disappointed in me).

New Mail.app is nothing really to write home about. Still no ability to arbitrarily file things using only the keyboard. It’s like Apple saw Sparrow and decided they would make something with a worse UI. I’ll stick to GMail web UI, thanks.

iCal promised to bring a fantastic new UI. It’s basically the same as old iCal, except they’ve made it look more like a leather journal with pages torn out of it.

Your username now appears constantly in the menu bar, with no apparent way to hide it. I am the only user of this computer and I know my name, thanks, Apple. Update: Maxim Harper tells me that you can remove this by CMD-dragging on the name. Thank Christ!

To view the desktop, you now have to “spread with thumb and three fingers”, which is just about as difficult as it sounds. Rather than sweep up with four fingers, which was super easy to do on a whim.

CoreAnimation pervades your entire experience in Lion. It makes every single little thing you try to do take just that little bit longer. You do things by Apple’s rhythm, now, punk. Pages turn, things zip about and flash and fade in-and-out. Why? I have no idea. I thought Windows 7 was a little over-animation-y, but this is ridiculous. Interface animation adds nothing to your ability to accomplish a task. If you want to stare at a pretty rectangle for a bit, buy some tropical fish.

Things I like about Lion

LaunchBar still works.

(Also a shitty photo. First day back after two days off results in reading lots of email)

Any recommendations for essential Linux software (even obvious stuff – I might’ve missed it!) are gratefully received at my twitter.

Now, I know what you’re thinking; that’s his desk. Yes, it is his desk. It’s also a portable studio, capable of recording some sick licks (yeah, I said it) providing you’re able. Sadly, I’m not really, but I like to pretend.

Kit list as follows:
iPhone 4
Ampkit LINK by Peavey and Agile Partners
Ampkit+
MacBook Pro
Garageband
Stereo amplifier and speakers or a set of headphones (for monitorin’).
Also, iPad and TabToolkit when Charlotte isn’t using the iPad to watch Family Guy or Futurama or something.

Once I’ve put something down that doesn’t make me sound like some fingerless muppet, I’ll upload it, but so far this is so much fun. Get it.

I’ll write a better, fuller review when I’ve had chance to play properly and record some stuff.

Apple; you make amazing computers. Your hardware is sturdy and reliable, and when it’s not reliable you have great customer services to back it up. Your operating system is Unix-compliant, attractive, relatively stable and easy to use. Your phones are well-made and have a pretty decent OS, which is improving at an acceptable rate. You as an entity are the only weak link in the chain. You are the overbearing mother of the technology world; you refuse to ever let your products truly go to their new owners.

Without the indie software scene, OSX would be nothing. Sadly, some parts of the OS are so frustratingly closed that some things become almost prohibitive. The software you build and sell is fit for purpose (on-par with industry in some cases, below in most), but not nearly adequately varied to rival Windows or Linux.

When you released your phone, it was like the popular girl in school – looked so good in every way, but forced to spend more than 10 minutes with it and you wanted to smash it against a rock. Then came the App Store, and things were good for a while. You still, however, refused to let go control and some trivial things became impossible. This prompted an incredibly talented and generous group of people to start hacking the device so that people were free to use it as they wished. This was, after all, their right (regardless of terms and licensing – you part with outrageous amounts of cash, the right is yours!). You struggled for a while, but now you seem to have given up, which is nice. Thanks.

All of this meandering leads me to the crux of my point. You might be able to pull the wool over some people’s eyes regarding Flash on your devices, but you don’t fool me. I hope your hypocrisy left a horrible taste in your mouth when you wrote your letter to Adobe. If you think that any piece of Mac hardware or software is open, you must be kidding yourself as well as everyone else. How dare you preach openness whilst you supply us with phones and iPods that you can’t even change the fucking battery in?! How dare you preach openness when I have to run the risk of rendering my phone useless just so I can install software I want on it?! How fucking dare you preach openness when you actively and vocally restrict Flash from being installed in any capacity on a device that I own?!

And another thing; HTML5 may well be relatively open compared to Flash, but if I want to use HTML5 video, I guess I’ll be needing the H.264 codec (at time of writing). That famously open source codec. What’s that? It’s not open source? So Firefox (truly open) will never be able to support it? Sounds great.

Before you preach openness, maybe you should do some research into what that actually is! Give your devices to your customers and let them do what they wish. If I want to deplete my battery in 10 minutes using Flash and all my simultaneous processes, that’s my prerogative. If I want to consequently complain, you’ve got leverage to tell me where to get off! Honestly, sometimes your smug sense of superiority makes me hate you and everyone who makes excuses for you.

I hope I’ve made my point.

Onto you now, Adobe. This will be shorter.

Hey, Adobe. I see you’re getting all upset because Apple won’t let Flash run on their mobile devices. That’s pretty annoying for everyone involved. Whilst I disagree with their methods, I am totally with their justification. If you can’t even write a Flash plugin for a device with 2.66Ghz Dual Core processor, 4GB RAM and 512MB graphics memory without resorting to slowdown, memory hunger and frequent crashing, then you shouldn’t be writing plugins for devices with a fraction of that power. Seriously, Flash is the number one reason I scream at my laptop every day, and I’m almost certain that there’s plenty you can do about it. I wonder why you don’t.

I heard that Apple also now ban apps from being distributed using their nice, open App Store if they’ve been compiled using IDEs you wrote. Man, that sounds just like something they’d do, but have you ever actually used one of the apps compiled with your IDE? As a technical exercise to prove it’s possible, you’ve nailed it. Go you. But try using one. My God, it borders on harrowing it’s so terrible.

Your problem is really quite similar to Apple’s when you think about it. You give developers all of these great tools that can theoretically do amazing things, then you totally screw them by making a horrendous platform for their use. This subsequently screws their users, too, because people just don’t want to use apps that frustrate them. I’m now at the stage where I close any website that looks like it’s full-Flash. It’s that bad.

In case I haven’t made it apparent what might help you – make Flash better. Make it not crash browsers and eat memory and slow computers down all the time. I know it’s not as simple as that, but if anyone can do it it’s you. Seriously, no-one else could because, well, they’re not allowed!

And now, to my avid reader. There you have it; Apple and Adobe are just as bad as each other. So bad, in fact, that it’s created a convenient little blind-spot to badness that both of them can live in until the mighty Google comes along and sells the world to aliens after America accidentally signed it over to them without reading small print.

If you really care about open, buy an Android phone. Wait, that’s Google. Buy a Palm. Wait, that’d be a pointless waste of your time. Uhh. Sell all your stuff and go live in the woods with hippies and the squirrels so that none of this inane shit really even matters any more.

I hate when she sits on the Airport Extreme, but I guess a cat’s got to have a warm ass.

So therapeutic.

My laptop, rather suddenly, gave up on me yesterday so I’ve had to get a new one. All technology seems to be against me recently. That’s quite an annoyance for a web developer/wannabe programmer.

You’re looking at our new bed/part deposit on a house. The worst part is, I’m not even excited. Is that a breakthrough?

The key factor to this, in my opinion, is that it always seems to be approached from the angle of “how can we least irritate the users of this site, but still gain money from their use of it?”. This, to me, is a fundamental flaw in the logic. You are much more likely to successfully monetise a site if people actually benefit from what they’re paying for. It’s obviously easier to do this by offering perks to paying users in the same vein as flickr or vimeo’s increased bandwidth/storage space limits, but you really have to rack your brain for a decent model when it comes to most of your users having free accounts.

Untargeted advertising is awful. It’s intrusive, mostly irrelevant and makes designers cry. Google tried to combat irrelevance by keyword matching content of sites or, more controversially, emails. It almost worked, except for the fact that it somehow didn’t. No-one clicks Google text ads unless they’re specifically trying to generate click revenue for a site. This means that the advertising has failed. It’s not a scalable or future proof way to monetise a site, so it’s out. No untargeted ads.

Facebook have recently been really picking up the game with respect to advertising. I mention that I like movies and music on my profile. I talk to my friends about web development, gaming, social media, photography and more and I get small ads (which are obviously Facebook-approved and sit inline with the design of the site (I don’t want to get into Facebook’s design. That’s a whole other can of worms)). They also offer me the ability to vote-up or down an ad. I’ve not seen the movie Slumdog Millionnaire, and I have no interest in doing so, so I vote the ad down and don’t see it again. Brilliant.

Now, if I were a sensible businessman, I would take these ratings and apply them to conversations I have with my friends about movies. If one of my friends mentions that they like movies, and maybe even give as much detail as sharing similar film taste, my voting-up an ad would make it more likely to appear in their ad rotation. Brilliant. That, to me, is the way that targeted advertising should be done. Friends talk about things together, they recommend things, they get adverts that logic dictates they might like. They’re not all going to be winners, but it’s a solid foundation that, with enough data and participation, could provide a self-perpetuating engine for revenue generation that all the owners have to do is assign keywords to and release to the wild. Yes, a lot of programming has to go into this sort of thing, but the rewards are potentially phenomenal. Especially with the userbase that Facebook has.

So, where does that leave twitter? I don’t have any statistics, but I see a lot of businesses have adopted twitter. I’m a particular fan of indie Mac developers and I exercise this enthusiasm by following their updates on twitter. I’m a bleeding-edge kinda guy and I like to know when new stuff is coming out that I can play with. What if you were to apply the same model to twitter? You already have the interaction between consumer and business right there, but it lacks the audience in some cases, so we make it special.

Say every twitter user has their own tag cloud (for those of you who don’t read any other blogs, a visualisation of word density/popularity comparative to overall volume) to target ads to. I mention the word “Mac” or “Apple” (probably) on a freakishly regular basis and so do a lot of my followers/followees. I, therefore, see a valuable type of advertising which has a special kind of (purchased) tweet with a wider scope. Say the good people a PotionFactory want to send out an ad, they hit up twitter, buy a “penetweet” (I should TM that it’s so good), associate some keywords and BAM, anyone who follows PotionFactory sees the ad. Anyone who’s friends with someone following PotionFactory who has a high enough keyword density of any number of the keywords PotionFactory bought when they bought the ad sees it. It appears inline with their tweets, it doesn’t say the word “sponsored” on it or anything tacky like that, it just sinks down with the rest of the tweets (or maybe stays up longer for a premium (not too long, though)) and everyone goes about their day.

So, there you have it. An unintrusive, targeted advertising engine built on the contents of people’s tweets, who they follow and who their friends follow. It easily fits in a tiered model (different tariffs give you access to more keywords, lower concentration of keywords for ads to be shown to users) and is far better, in my opinion, than the arbitrary character-limit-increase-based model that I’ve seen floating around recently!

I’d love to hear any readers’ thoughts on this, as I know most twitter users will have floated around their own ideas, if only internally.

Well, not anymore! I’ve found that if you yank the plug out really quick, then plug it back in before the OS notices what you’ve done, it rejigs the drive back to life and you can carry on as normal. Obviously, it would be better if it just worked, but where’s the fun in that?!

For the record, slow though it is, I recommend using USB2 for regular use. I transfer large files with Firewire, but idle with USB2. Again, not ideal but at least it’s a solution(ish).