In which I pit Apple for a diabolical annoying change in Lion

Look, this may be just too mild for The Pit, but it is a constant annoyance to me since I upgraded to Lion on the very first day it was available.

Some background - I work with PCs every day at work and Mac every night at home. I’m hardly a power user, but I’ve been a daily user in some specialized areas (newspaper design/layout/ad creation, then audio production for broadcast) for nearly a quarter century.

I often work with large documents.

The new Lion system has eliminated the up and down arrows on the scrollbars. You’d think that wouldn’t be a big deal. After all, you can always move the elevator on the scrollbar itself, can’t you.

NO YOU CAN’T, Dammit! (Or at least I can’t)

The larger the document, the smaller the damn little elevator. Just try and move a couple of lines or a paragraph down on a multipage document, and you’ll zoom from the title page to the middle of page 8. You can spend an inordinate amount of time zooming back and forth trying to get close to where you want to be.

They were working JUST FINE, you Cupertino clowns!

What have you got against arrows?

[Nicholas Cage Voice from Con Air] Put…the arrows…back…in the box![/Nicholas Cage Voice from Con Air]

I totally agree. Then again, I’m still pissed from when they moved the arrows from the top and bottom of the scrollbar to next to each other at the bottom.

Which I think might have been System 8 or 9.

In other words: you kids get off my lawn!

Don’t know if this helps or not. But, maybe?

Hey, can I join this pitting for the way that Lion keeps wanting to open all my windows when it boots up if I hadn’t closed all windows when I shut down?

Hey Apple, ya know what?

SHUTTING OFF THE FUCKING COMPUTER IS BY DEFAULT SHUTTING DOWN ALL THE FUCKING WINDOWS!!!

When I want Safari to open up, I’LL FUCKING OPEN SAFARI, thank you very much.

The Steve is making your computing experience simpler and more intuitive. The Steve thinks the new way is better. Who are you to question The Steve?

This ignores the general rule that software must be frequently updated to show that the company is innovative and/or demonstrate that employees are on the ball. One must never fall into the trap of keeping an effective product in its current form (the prime example here is Itunes - frequently updated, usually resulting in an uglier or less useful product.

With all I’ve heard about Lion, I think I’ll be sticking with my beloved Snow Leopard for now.

Actually, that’s one of the features I like. I used to put off installing updates because I was always in the middle of several things and didn’t want to shut down, and close all my open windows, and then restart again.

That said, I’m surprised there’s no way to turn off this behavior. I haven’t looked for any options to do so, since it doesn’t bug me, but everything else that bugged me (like the reverse scroll gesture) was easy to set back to the behavior I was used to.

Anyhow, I enjoy Lion more than Snow Leopard, but I have a couple legacy apps (MS Office 2004) that are no longer supported, so I’ve only installed it on one computer.

My workplace (government) has issued frantic emails saying that we can’t buy Lion systems because it is currently unable to support our security measures. However, in the currently “supported” Snow Leopard, these security measure allows you to log in to your computer, but not using them DOES NOT BLOCK YOU FROM LOGGING IN. Which makes them pretty much useless as security measures go, really.

Also, if anyone was interested in my data I’d give it to them. Free!

Wait. So you’re saying it’s like they put a freestanding locked door in front of your office building, not attached to a wall or anything, that you could just walk around, and Security didn’t give a shit if you just walked *around *the door instead of stopping to use your key to unlock it and walk through?

That’s pretty much exactly it. But we can’t buy Lion systems because they can’t unlock the door.

It’s the scroll wheel change that most irritated me. They changed it to be…the exact opposite of what it used to be. That’s right - down is now up, and up is now down.

It took me a while to find the setting, which in itself is laughable:

System Preferences -> Mouse, enable “Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating.”

Why on Earth that was added, and added disabled so that the direction of scrolling in every scrollwheel-aware application since its original inclusion on the mouse was backwards, is baffling to me.

I believe you’ll find that setting is to make the trackpad edge scroll feature work in the more natural direction. Why that’s the same setting as a scrollwheel on a mouse I don’t know. Maybe Steve still thinks everyone’s using old one-button and no wheel proper Apple mice?

There’s gotta be a way. When I shut down yesterday (might be the first time I did a shutdown since the upgrade), there was a checkbox asking me if I wanted to reopen all the windows on startup. Or maybe that’s when I was logging off? I’m confused now. I’ll have to see if that dialog box shows up again.

The thing I find to be the biggest pain in the ass about Lion is they’ve done away with the 3 finger gesture up or down on the trackpad to take you instantly to the top or bottom of a page. If I’m in the middle of a long page or document and I want to go to the beginning, I have to do a series of upwards two finger gestures to get there.

Here’s my one finger gesture to you, Steve.

So you aren’t a fan of just dragging your two fingers up and down on the trackpad?

You’ve made this complaint before. I still don’t understand why it’s so difficult to close the application before you shut down if you don’t want the window restored on boot up? Cmd+Q. It’s simple.

Yeah, when I shut down it offers me the option of having all my windows/applications reopen on restart. I unclick it and groove on out the door.

Okay, this right here bugs the crap out of me. Why the fuck does an OS have to use a non-intuitive naming convention like that? Was using version numbers just too mainstream for Apple?

They do use version numbers - Snow Leopard is 10.6, Lion is 10.7 - but the names are catchier and more easily remembered by technophobes, a market Apple is also heavily aiming for.

Besides, is it really more non-intuitive than Windows 3.11, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista and 7? I don’t think so…