Monday 25th July 2011
OSX Lion
So I recently upgraded my macbook pro to [OSX Lion][lion]. I must say I'm quite impressed: Lion only cost ~£20 for the whole family, I can't remember any other commercial OS costing so little. The upgrade process was painless, I simply clicked the buy button in the App store and the rest was automatic.
I only had one minor issue to resolve, after the update. OSX Lion is the first version of OSX to move to a more traditional model for Java. Previously Java was built into OSX, whereas now you get Java for OSX just like you do for other operating systems. I found out that I didn't have Java when I tried to run java from the terminal. OSX helpfully notified me that Java was not installed and offered to install it for me. A click later and I had a JRE. At this point I knew that if I'd just installed a JRE then I wouldn't have a JDK. A quick google revealed a link to Apple developers website and a JDK download. Suffice to say, it was painless to install Java on OSX.
I like the new features in Lion, but I'm not 100% convinced about the new way scrolling works. In short "up" is now "down" and "down" is now "up". This makes lots of sense with a touch pad because you basically shove the page in the direction you want to move it, but sadly this concept fails with a mouse wheel on an external mouse because now you have to retrain your fingers in every application. I'm not sure how to proceed here... I really like natural use for the touch pad, but I'd like to see this settable on a per device basis, this would let me keep the way the mouse wheel works without losing the benefit of the new natural scrolling.
