Updating Mac OS to X Lion

[Jester]

*ninja merge

[padi_04]

It won't let me, I tried doing that earlier too. And do you know how to get rid of that gray screen when you do 4 fingers up? As well as all those extra screens?

Thanks guys.

That gray screen is mission control (expose + spaces). Show Desktop gesture has changed and is now 4 finger zoom out.

As always, customizing the gestures is kinda limited, get BetterTouchTool if you want more control over them.

[padi_04]

2 things that really annoy me are:
*There is no way to use your MB hooked up to an external display while disabling the interal display and keep the lid open (temp safety reasons).
*If you are indeed using both monitors and running a fullscreen app, the secondary display just shows a gray wallpaper.

[Zoosh]

I used Lion on my machine with s4 and TP2 last night at a gig for about 5 hours solid as usual. The finger swipe stuff is a bit annoying though but i suppose you get used to it.

[fullenglishpint]

That external monitor thing does sound annoying. The only thing I've come across so far that's really tedious other than that sound card problem is reorganising Launchpad - takes FOREVER.

[Alex Wild]

Are there any real benefits in updating? Everything I've read is just all about apps, which I don't use.

[mostapha]

Ah, I see what you're saying. I guess my assumption was that in the case of installing Lion, the installing creates a recovery partition, which as far as the OS is concerned isn't the same as splitting off a chunk of free space into a separate partition, so that might require unmounting the drive, rebooting the system, etc.

I could be wrong though! And if someone can correct me on the exact process that the Lion installer takes to perform these tasks, I will happily admit so.

Oh, it does that. And it does require a restart. That's just not why it requires a restart. OS X can resize the mounted, active system partition live and can create, format, erase, etc. anything other than the active system partition.

It's actually quite useful and amazing compared to having to buy software to do exactly that back when I was on windows.

2 things that really annoy me are:
*There is no way to use your MB hooked up to an external display while disabling the interal display and keep the lid open (temp safety reasons).
*If you are indeed using both monitors and running a fullscreen app, the secondary display just shows a gray wallpaper.

Yes there is. Kinda. Set the displays to mirror each other and turn the screen brightness all the way down…I do that all the time for watching movies. You don't lose windows or the cursor on the screen you can't see, and you don't have to look at the laptop screen.

There's even a keystroke for switching on and off screen mirroring…I think it's like cmd+fn+F1 (or cmd+F1 depending on whether or not you have it set to use the brightness, volume, etc. shortcuts). Well…unless they changed it. It's been around for a while.

The sadder thing is that there's been a SIMBL extension available for years that enabled fullscreen for the vast majority of applications. And it didn't have that issue. You could just use the other screen normally.

The only thing I've come across so far that's really tedious other than that sound card problem is reorganising Launchpad - takes FOREVER.

Have you found any reason to even bother? Quicksilver, Holmes, or Spotlight still have to be faster, right?

[padi_04]

Yes there is. Kinda. Set the displays to mirror each other and turn the screen brightness all the way down…I do that all the time for watching movies. You don't lose windows or the cursor on the screen you can't see, and you don't have to look at the laptop screen.

I would, but monitors have different resolutions. No point in using an external if you are gonna run the mac's native resolution (specially with a 13" model).

It can be done with 3rd party apps tho, but I think apple should step up their game on this one, windows had better monitor management for years.

[amidoinitrite]

I would, but monitors have different resolutions. No point in using an external if you are gonna run the mac's native resolution (specially with a 13" model).

It can be done with 3rd party apps tho, but I think apple should step up their game on this one, windows had better monitor management for years.

the eff with monitor management.. I want their time spent on something useful.

[jimbob5000]

Are there any real benefits in updating? Everything I've read is just all about apps, which I don't use.

Apple tends to stop developing updates for older OS versions pretty quickly, so I guess the major benefit will be that you'll still get security fixes and things like that. On the other hand, install a first major release from apple and you will inevitably run into somevbugs. So I guess it's a good idea to not update YET, wait until 10.7.1 or .2 is out, and then update.
I should have done that. Haven't. Bad idea. So far no major problems to report, except that my mid 2009 unibody Macbook's fan seems to kick in a bit earlier. Fingers crossed.

P.S.: Had an unexpected sudden shutdown while DJing (at home) yesterday. Couldn't turn it on again without power supply, so I guess the battery was empty. Problem: Didn't get any warning that power is low before the shutdown. When I had it back on, it was at 13%. Under Snow Leopard, I had a warning when I was at 7% and enough time to take action. This is annoying. After a quick web research, my guess is that it's probably just my battery starting to throw in the towel. Will do some sessions with power supply and some without to test that.