The iOS-ification of Mac OS X

Martin D sent me this link to iOS-ification of Mac OS X (meaning the changes to OS X that come from the iPad and iPhone). It’s a good survey of just what is going on with Mac OS X Lion.

In my view, 90% of the changes in Lion are useless eye candy (good for marketing), but create their own sticky problems: they degrade the user’s ability to get productive work done.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To my huge disappointment, the once vaunted Apple user interface design team now has been issued iOS hammers and Mac OS X Lion is the nail. And the nail that stands up gets hammered down.

This quote from Martin D pretty much sums up my feelings about Lion:

For the most part, I think Lion sucks.

It’s going to suck even more once Apple “sandboxing” foisted upon developers starts forcing the removal of useful features and we get “processed food” applications— baby food in a jar, so to speak.

What to do

While I still advise Mac users to go with Lion (since it’s the future, and the Mac OS X train has left the station), OS X Lion continues to degrade my productivity to this day, especially with the missing “Save As” dialog and You are Not Connected to the Internet and Apple Mail taking accounts down for days. See Mac OS X Lion Hairballs.

Mac OS X Lion usability is not yet this bad, but it portends worse things to come