Having lived now with Lion for around 2 weeks on my home Mac Pro, I’m ready to report that it’s not ready for prime time.

Often, Mail crashes. Safari gets bogged down and loads webpages so slowly it’s painful (as a test, I load the same page in Chrome at expected, fast clips). Control-scroll wheel zoom no longer works (even though it’s checked-off to use). Sometimes I can’t drag windows around.

I like some of the enhancements and refinements. But it doesn’t seem fully baked.

I actually now enjoy going to my work laptop running Snow Leopard. Here’s to hoping these bugs get squashed through an update soon.

I own a 2.93GHz quad-core Mac Pro at home which serves as my main computer and so-called “media hub.” I’ve been very happy with the Machine since purchasing in 2009.

It has been far quieter than its predecessor, a PowerMac G5. But, it does suffer one flaw: the Bluetooth antenna was improperly made and installed, and Bluetooth performance suffers considerably. I cannot use Bluetooth mice or audio devices with the machine with any reliability.

But with a 2 years and 4 months behind owning this machine, and several upgrades in hard drives, I figured it was time to get the most out of the machine. I’d call this its mid-life extension upgrade. Typically I might upgrade memory, or perhaps a graphics card, but my needs for performance have not increased since buying the machine in April, 2009. While I use one nice display (a NEC PA271W), the graphics card could still drive a second.

After using a MacBook Air and its SSD flash memory, I knew what I had to do… go for a faster drive.

I was forward thinking back in 2009. When I purchased the machine, I also purchased a VelociRaptor HDD that spins at 10,000 RPM instead of the typical 7200. This smaller drive maxed out at 300GB and could not accommodate all of my data. So at that time I installed Mac OS X on the fast drive and moved my user folder onto a second, larger drive.

To wit, my drive configuration currently is this:

• Boot (Mac OS X, 2 user accounts)
• Data (2 TB, shared folder, my home folder/account)
• Media (1 TB for iTunes movies and music)
• Scratch (250GB for temporary storage of video, Photoshop cache, etc.)

So the tricky part was moving my Home folder to another drive. I did this through the Advanced Options by right-clicking on my name under the Accounts Systems Preference. It’s best if you have a root account where you actually perform this, then logout and login.

I should also mention at this point that I also use Time Machine, through an Apple Time Capsule base station connected via Ethernet. It only backs up my home folder, and I complete other backup tasks by cloning each of the three main drives using Carbon Copy Cloner and a Voyager HDD accessory (it mounts SATA drives without an enclosure).

I chose the so-called 6G model from Other World Computing which has been a good source for my HD and memory needs over several years. They ship fast and they have some of the better products for Macs for sale.

At 240 GB, this drive would shave off some growing room from the VelociRaptor, but I also did some pruning on that drive to lighten the space required.

1. I cloned the drive using CCC after already upgrading to Mac OS X Lion the week before.
2. I took out the old drive, and slid in the new. The SSD required an adapter to fit into the 3.5 inch slot in the Mac Pro.
3. The machine is now even quieter. (The one downside of the VelociRaptor is its noise.)

Boot time now is insanely quick. After the gray screen and gray Apple, it’s almost instantaneous to see the login screen. Cool.

But logging into my account, the change in speed was not dramatic. After all, my user account was on a slower (but far larger) hard drive. I know the current trend is not to move the entire Home directory to a slow drive, but instead to take your larger media files and move them to the larger drive. This would stand to reason if you had a MacBook Air and then when you could, you’d connect to a larger server to access music, photos, etc.

Likely at my next machine upgrade I will take this approach.

But could I squeeze any more speed out of my current configuration?

I logged into a secondary account that lives on the SSD. I don’t have a lot of files there, as I never really use the account. But web browsing seemed a tad faster. Hmmm…

So to squeeze more out of the new drive, I moved my Caches to the SSD drive. Caches are directories which store temporary information, including your web browser. Normally, this is information we’d want to store in memory so it was quickly available. But memory is expensive and far from infinite. So, we store it on disk. As your computer needs to constantly write/read to these caches, it slows down at each process. Take away that latency, and you should feel that the computer gets faster.

To move the ~/Library/Caches folder, I used Ditto in the Terminal. The command looked something like this:

ditto ~/Library/Caches /Volumes/Boot/Users/Shared

This copies the folder over. Since all users can use “Shared,” permissions wouldn’t need to be touched. This is fine for me, as I am the only user of the machine. If you share your Mac and are concerned about privacy, then you should change the permissions on that directory.

Then, I logged in as root, deleted the original “Caches” directory in my jhendron account, and then created an alias to the new “Caches,” and moved it into my Library folder. Conversely, I could have done everything from the command line using ln -s to create in Unix-speak the “symbolic link.”

When I logged back into my main account, things went well; new data was being written to “Caches” without incident. And yes, things like browsing do appear to me to be Snappier.

At the end of this past school year I migrated to a new laptop, and chose a MacBook Air over the heavier, more capable MacBook Pro. The two things I would give up were an optical drive and a physical hard drive. I’d have to be lean about what I kept on the laptop.

The optical drive didn’t really concern me. I rarely burned discs, and far less, did I find myself reading CD-ROMs.

But this article recently pointed out that Apple’s war against the physical disc is continuing now with their Mac mini.

Some criticism stems from the fact that they excluded the drive, but the space for it is still present in the case design. (A souped-up model can be ordered that places an SSD in the vacant chasm.) I really didn’t think it was a big deal; after all, the iMac still has a drive and so does their Mac Pro (the model I use at home). But as I pulled a CD from the shelf today, as I considered we need to upgrade soon another MacBook Pro here at home, the thought hit.

“How will we listen or rip CDs once all the drives are gone?”

Of course, Apple sells a stand-alone drive for folks who need it, but that’s extra money, and it’s extra space with a cord.

I agreed 100% with Apple on their decision in 2000 to ditch the floppy disc with the iMac line. Today, of course, flash drives have replaced floppies and even the larger copy-cats, the ZIP and Jaz drives. And with 4 GB flash drives becoming the norm, they’re replacing the tedium of burning data onto a double-sided DVD-ROM. But I am nostalgic for the CD jewel case, the booklet inside (most today are made of cardboard as opposed to plastic), and even though you can buy digital music with PDF-booklets, the booklet too many times is an afterthought. And the quality of an iTunes album isn’t the same as the 16-bit version on CD that’s endured as the standard for over 30 years.

The good news is that higher-resolution albums are now for sale. But before Apple ditches the optical drives forever, they ought to pave the way by innovating further in providing a superior experience with booklets, higher-resolution digital files (uncompressed, 24-bit would be ideal), and a backup solution that doesn’t require Joe Music to go out and buy a NAS device.

This past week Apple released the next version of Mac OS X, 10.7 “Lion.”

This is a very different beast for a number of reasons.

1. It is distributed via Apple’s Mac App Store (online).
2. It comes without Flash built-in.
3. It’s got some glaring UI flaws.
4. It introduces across the system the idea of full-screen apps.
5. It adopts interface elements from iOS, their mobile platform.

In about a year, Lion will be awesome, as 3rd party developers will have adopted (hopefully) some of Apple’s ground-breaking features. The distribution and installation went well for me, even though I split my install over 2 drives (one for OS, the other for my data). This won’t be an exhaustive review, but let me note a few things I’ve noticed.

1. The correction while I’m typing is well-done and better than what appeared earlier in apps like TextEdit. On-screen controls show me it’s correcting my (bad) typing, and widgets appear as needed for correcting their correction.
2. It has a very white, very-light gray feel to the interface.
3. iTunes in full-screen mode sometimes doesn’t take up the full screen, moving to the side on the left to accommodate a not-there Dock.
4. The release feels fast and stable, while doing things like Misson Control.
5. They hid the Library folder in your ~/home directory. You can get it back through a terminal command. (Stupid!)
6. The drive where my home folder is located keeps appearing in the sidebar in the Finder as a “favorite,” despite the fact I keep removing it.
7. I like different desktops for different screens (via Mission Control)
8. The iTunes screen saver is “live” now, and allows you to play the CDs/albums.
9. Scrolling is backwards, but can be reversed.
10. Quicktime 7 still lives on.
11. Scroll bars are not bad, they are often displayed in my windows as a light gray widget which I can live with.
12. A launcher like Alfred is still faster than their “Launchpad.”
13. The computer no longer “wakes out of sleep” with a shake of the mouse (not real sleep, but the sleep that turns off the monitor).
14. The mail icon’s display of the number of un-read messages is more difficult to read.
15. Mail could use more than a blue dot to show unread messages.
16. Autosaving files is cool for the apps that support it.
17. iPhoto won’t launch now for me.
18. The user icons are all circles.
19. Spotlight indexing takes a long time the first time you login after updating.
20. Too many blue icons (Safari, App Store, iTunes, iChat).
21. Mail window moves up as a new message gets sent; have seen instances where it gets sent, but the window does not woosh away.
22. You’ll need to update your 1Password.
23. I like moving between “spaces” or screens with Command-arrows.
24. The window widgets are now smaller and further apart.
25. Screen zooming is broken for me, using Control-scroll wheel. Using a window to do it (new feature) does work, and is interesting.

That’s it so far… it is neat discovering new little changes and tweaks across the system. Be sure to report issues as found. I did so for the Mail bug, but oddly enough, the webpage it took me to, to report the issue, only listed 10.6.8 as the newest version of OS I could report using. Whoops.

The iPad seems to be a typical Apple product and not quite the innovation it seems to be at first sight. Instead, it is yet another example of how an idea that has been worked on for a while can be refined to perfection, at least as far as today’s market requirements are concerned. I do not believe that Apple deserves all the credit it receives today and it is a shame that the iPad’s origins are widely unknown.

A little background into Alan Kay, squeak, and the iPad as dynabook.