Lukas Mathis on Mac OS X Lion

I'm surprised that I haven't read anyone that has connected the dots on the app store for Mac and the emphasis on the Macbook Air. The app store solves the problem for how does one get shrink-wrapped applications onto a Mac with no optical drive? In the future, they may remove optical drives from their laptops entirely.

Whenever and wherever there is some pain, there is an opportunity. The universal pain of the tech-savvy and the constant help they have to give to relatives and friends is simply huge. Neither has OS X made this go away, though much of it has been outsourced in the form of the Genius Bar. It's much the same in the workplace, if not more so! What the majority of the population wants is <i>curated computing</i>. What IT departments try to provide as had as they might is <i>curated computing</i>. It's also a fact that they're hindered by the open architecture of today's typical computer. (Why do you think enterprise IT tries so hard to lock everything down?)<p>There is still a huge amount of pain and therefore there's tremendous opportunity.<p>My prediction is that under Lion, end-user computing is going to run locked-down under a hypervisor, and only devs/power users will be running as we do today.

Spot-on criticism of the App Store.<p>The App Store is peerless as far as purchasing and installing go, but it's nearly useless for discovery unless you're looking for something on the order Angry Birds or Facebook. Calling the Mac version "the best place to find apps" wouldn't ring so hollow if the same were remotely true on iOS.

I must say, the deprecating of Java does concern me. I do agree that Apple has been somewhat slow to update their version of Java. It's also strange that they default to 1.5 instead of 1.6. In principle, having Oracle maintain the JVM sounds ok.<p>However, I understand that the Apple Java makes use of hidden API's in order to provide the level of integration that it does. That integration always impressed me and was one of the many things that originally sold me on using Macs for development. Will Apple work with Oracle to achieve the same level of integration? Or is this really a sneaky way of trying to kill Java on Mac?<p>I miss the Apple that loved Next, used Java internally, among other languages, and spent a lot of time trying to make technical users happy with things like X11 support and Apple integrated Java. These things are what brought me to the platform.

Interesting writeup. I think calling both the installation process and the window management system "broken" is a bit of an overstatement, but he's very right about de-emphasizing the Finder.<p>Lukas' blog in general is awesome — thought-provoking and mind-opening. If you have the smallest interest in design (as in "how thing work" in general, not only "how things look"), it's definitely worth a read.

LaunchPad: a no-hierarchy version of the Windows Start Menu. Desktops get too many programs installed to be able to find them reasonably in such a thing. We learned that <i>fifteen years ago</i> on Windows. Even my phone is starting to get unreasonable to manage with the number of programs installed. Windows Vista and 7 have the ability to search the start menu because of it.<p>The App Store: I love the ability to browse packages on my Ubuntu and PC-BSD systems and install them with no hassle. I wish this existed on Windows (MS toys with it every once in a while, with the Web Platform Install Kit and the Visual Studio Plugins site). But it sounds like Apple is going to lock it down. They could have their cake and eat it too if they would make the application repository configurable, with the default pointing to Apple's servers, and the config item roughly hidden in an obscure setting somewhere. But Apple continues to assert that you don't own your computer, you rent it from them.<p>Full-screen apps: welcome to 1990. From experience, I loathe default-full-screen programs. I like to have the option available, and I think we've come to a consensus that that should be through the F11 key, but starting a program, waiting, and having it take over the entire screen is going to be a pain in the ass. It also basically torpedoes a lot of Apple dogma from previous years with no true ability to fully maximize program windows.<p>Ironically, these updates serve to make OS X even less differentiated than other Windows and KDE- or Gnome-based Linux distros than ever before.

Overlapping Windows is a non-issue. Windows and full-screen intermingle with the new Mission Control.<p>Windows and Linux get Java from Oracle; why not OS X?

I prefer SizeUp to Divvy for OS X Window management: <a href="http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/" rel="nofollow">http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/</a>

That's a lot of blah blah claiming to be about Lion, when it's really not so much about Lion at all. So far, these details are to the most part just about <i>new applications</i> for Lion - and you can be sure that at least one of these will be available for Snow Leopard later on.<p>Maybe people should hold back on their second-guessing regarding Lion until we actually get some technical and substantial details to hold on to, but I guess as long as there are fools, there will be wolf calls...

It looks like I will finally have enough motivation to finally switch to Ubuntu. I just don't know if I can handle not having full control over my machine.