This is the ninth episode of the Ask Different Podcast. Your hosts this week are Kyle Cronin, Jason Salaz, and Nathan Greenstein.
- We’re back! Our (unplanned) summer sabbatical has ended, and we begin again. The length and frequency of our previous shows was too exhausting, so we’re cutting back a bit. Our shows will not occur every single week, as we’ve chosen to focus heavily on single subjects rather than attempt to cover the every-continuous stream of Apple and related news. We are currently planning on bi-weekly shows, with exceptions for significant events and product releases.
- We begin by sharing our experiences with the fast-growing Google+. These three early adopters’ are generally impressed by the circle management features and the ability to mute posts from people in your circles, but the service has its share of rough edges including a less-than-stellar native iOS client, and post ordering that doesn’t always keep older posts below newer ones.
- Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is finally here, and sure enough we’ve dedicated the lion’s share of the show to discussing it! We share our thoughts and experiences with the changes, big and small, to the most recent version of Mac OS X.
- We discuss transitioning to Lion’s auto-hiding scroll bars and reversed scrolling direction, and debate what configurations are appropriate for various types of input devices. Everyone’s made the switch except Nathan, who’s promised to give the changes another chance.
- We love gestures! Kyle and Jason’s high praise for Lion’s gesture integration leaves Nathan wanting a multi-touch input device.
- Lion’s new native full-screen capabilities are useful and slick, but they have at least one serious limitation. We discuss when full-screen is useful and when it isn’t, especially when used in combination with the new Mission Control. Kyle also put together a short video demonstrating how trivial it is to have multiple operating systems set up, and switch seamlessly between their desktop environments leveraging multiple spaces via Mission Control, and full screen modes.
- None of us have tried out Lion Server. Jason lays out the various reasons he’s reluctant to do so. We briefly touch on the notable changes generally known, such as the removal of MySQL invariably due to legal reasons with Oracle, and the continual lack of ZFS, originally slated to appear on Snow Leopard Server. On this and other topics, Kyle highly recommends John Siracusa’s review of Lion on Ars Technica, with particular reference to the “What’s wrong with HFS+” section, and Episode #27 of Hypercritical for details on ZFS’ numerous benefits among many other topics.
- Lion’s Versions feature is promising, but has its share of limitations. We compare it to other revision tracking technologies and look at its key features and potential pitfalls. Hopefully, we’ll soon see more apps start to integrate Versions in exciting and original ways.
- Lion brings a complete overhaul to the way Mac OS X is installed and restored. We share our feelings on Apple’s decision to move everything away from restore DVDs to internet downloads and a recovery partition.
- Our question of the week is What tiny thing in Lion makes you smile or has caught you off-guard?, asked July 20 by bmike.
- Each of us pick our favorite tips that have originated on this question, and references to it from Reddit and Hacker News.
- In addition to these sources of traffic coming to our corner of the Stack Exchange network, Ask Different sponsored Daring Fireball!
- In lieu of just one single app, we talk about some of our favorite apps that have been released or updated after Lion’s release.
- Nathan revisits Coda and how the new features that Lion brings could greatly benefit the app.
- Kyle highlights BBEdit 10 as a dramatic improvement to a fantastic multi-purpose editor, which is currently on sale for $39.99 ($10-off for the next two months!).
- Jason sings praises for a post-only Twitter client known as Wren, and talks about how it takes advantage of many Lion-specific features.
- We wrap up our discussion talking about Spotify and it’s integration into our respective music and media listening habits.
August 17th, 2011 at 3:28 pm
You didn’t like the iOS client? I personally think that it is fantastic now that it is for iPod Touch…. What do you dislike about it?
August 17th, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Hit the download link, and listen for the answer! These are just notes about the topics we cover on the show itself.
August 18th, 2011 at 2:50 am
Compared to the Facebook and especially the Twitter iOS apps, the Google+ app just doesn’t measure up. It has non-standard controls, bad animation, is slow updating, and has an awkward layout. Granted, the Google+ service and, by extension, the app are brand new, so there is a bit of a beta/shakedown period where stuff is being changed around and improved, but they’ve had the Google Voice app out for a year or so now, and as I said on the show it’s the same story there.