I upgraded my workstation Friday night to Lion, and have been living with it since then. Up until now, I’d only just played around on showroom computers and clicked around while resolving customers’ issues in the tech room. Since I transitioned to it on my own computer, I’ve had some trouble getting used to the new interface and gestures.
I’m still not completely up to speed with all the new features, and some of the new gestures have me somewhat stumped. For example, in Mail under previous versions of MacOS X, one could two-finger swipe to go from one mail message to the next. This same gesturing would allow you to swipe between conversations in iChat. Now, that two finger swipe defaults to moving between spaces. I haven’t taken the time quite yet to investigate how to change these things to better suit me, but I’m sure the options exist. That’s an article for next week.
The two finger swipe still allows you to go back and forward in Safari, which is tremendously useful; in fact, the animation under Lion as you go back and forward is very slick, and webpages back and forward appear almost instantly under Lion. It’s much better than in previous versions.
A specific problem I’ve had in Mail is the new layout. It doesn’t suit me just yet, and perhaps next weekend, when I don’t need to be working at my most efficient, I’ll give it another try. But poking around in the Mail preferences, under Viewing, I located a checkbox to go back to Classic view. Once I clicked that, I was presented with my old friend. You can revert to Classic view by navigating to Mail > Preferences > Viewing > Classic Layout.
What are your favorite new features in Lion?