Happy Tuesday,

After a seemingly endless heat wave, Saturday night brought cool breezes and temperatures in the high sixties. It was over 100 degrees Friday in much of Vermont, and even hotter in my warehouse office without air conditioning. Needless to say, the Mad River is a resource I am very thankful for. Many Small Dog employees at our Waitsfield, VT headquarters head to the river on their lunch breaks, or even just to cool off mid-afternoon.

While Lion is not yet qualified for use on Small Dog workstations, I borrowed a laptop over the weekend, installed Lion, and poked around a bit Sunday afternoon. I’m a big fan of the new gestures, but seemingly unable to overcome muscle memory to use the new “natural” scrolling feature. I disabled that in the first five minutes.

Launchpad seems to me unnecessary visual overload, but I’ve used Quicksilver to launch my programs for at least five years, so I’m biased. I don’t understand the appeal of “All My Files” seen in the Finder sidebars: why would you want to scroll through a giant list of files when you can use Spotlight?

Overall, though, Lion is a substantial step forward in interface and design. We should expect a continued trend towards iOS-like features in Mac OS. As Mac OS X ages and iOS matures, the lines will continue to blur. Some day iOS may succeed Mac OS entirely.

If you haven’t already, you can get your copy of Lion here.

As always, thanks for reading, and keep in touch.

Matt
matt@smalldog.com