Apple’s last(est) installment of OS X has been out for a few days now and I’ve had more than enough playtime to come to the conclusion that Apple totally missed the boat on this one. For each “oh, that’s cool!” moment there’s a few “WTF?!” moments. As much as this hurts to do, I must warn those who haven’t jumped on the Lion bandwagon yet…

Inverted Scrolling

Why is this considered default behavior? Sure it makes a TON of sense to use this method of scrolling on the iPad or iPhone, but that’s because you’re actually TOUCHING the screen. Using this approach with a mouse or trackpad just doesn’t work.

Even if there are some test results showing this method to be more efficient or whatever, it just simply doesn’t matter. People have been scrolling the “unnatural” way for years and it’s too much of a change to undo what we’ve been doing since the scroll wheel was invented.

Fix? Uncheck the “scroll direction: natural” box in the mouse settings panel.

Dashboard Widgets “Space”

Dashboard widgets are handy. I personally use the calculator widget religiously. Since the Lion update, the default behavior of the widgets is to open in it’s own “space”. What this means is that I can’t see the numbers I want to plug into the calculator. I’d have to jump back and forth to use it effectively. Why on earth would you need an entirely separate screen for widgets anyway?

Fix? Uncheck the “Show Dashboard as a space” box in the Mission Control settings panel.

Launchpad

I like the idea of Launchpad. I just don’t like how difficult and clunky it is to manage. You can’t bulk move elements around. You have to do it one-by-one. That is so annoying. Sorry Apple.

Fix? None that I’m aware of.

Moving Between Spaces

On my Macbook Pro, I use spaces all the time since I don’t have a second monitor hooked up. One thing Apple did away with was the ability to infinitely cycle through the different spaces using the arrow keys + the command key. Now, thanks to Lion, once you reach the left most space, you can’t continue to the right most space using Cmd+leftArrow, for example. This is very annoying.

Fix? None that I’m aware of.

Colorless UI

When opening a finder window, all the icons in the sidebar are now colorless. Sure it looks cleaner, but it’s a lot harder to quickly identify elements when they are all the same color and relative size.

Fix? None that I’m aware of.

Mouse Jumping

This is probably THE most annoying feature of Lion. When I move my mouse quickly, the cursor “jumps” to the farthest point in the direction you’re moving. On my iMac I’m using two HUGE monitors, and quickly moving my mouse not even an inch will span the ENTIRE width of the screens. Add to this the fact that I use “hot corners” and all hell breaks loose.

Fix? None that I’m aware of.

Conclusion

I’d recommend passing on the Lion update. I’ve had to undo a lot of the new features and haven’t had a single “wow, I’m glad I updated” experience. The only reason I would recommend updating is if you have a major need for your comp to run at a lower temperature – but that might be a rumor, I don’t know.

These are some pictures I took in Kirkland, WA. Pictures taken with iPhone using AutoStitch to make panoramas. Click images to enlarge.

Like you, I was very skeptical about this whole jailbreaking-your-iPhone thing. I always had the perception that once you do it you can’t undo it and I also feared that I would  somehow be breaking the law.

Rest assured, it’s nearly impossible to do any damage to your iPhone that cannot be undone (provided you’re smart and backup your iPhone before you consider doing anything to it), and no, it most certainly is not illegal to jailbreak your iPhone.

Heads Up

There is one caveat though: jailbreaking your iPhone does violate your service contract with AT&T. All this means is that if the jailbreak software goes bad, AT&T can’t help you. BUT, all you have to do to fix it is restore your iPhone to the backed-up version you created before you started this journey. Yay!

One other hang up I had was that even if I did jailbreak my iPhone, what the heck do I do with it? I’m not an iPhone developer. I can’t make my own apps (yet). Luckily, every jailbroken iPhone gets a program called ‘Cydia’, which is an app store for jailbroken apps. Some stuff costs money, but most of them (95%) are free!

Why?

So now that we are over that, let’s talk about why I jailbroke my iPhone. I personally did it for 5 reasons: (1) folders!, (2) notifications, (3) video recording, (4) theme customization, and (5) easier settings adjustments [I will say that Apple did address the video recording feature with the new iPhone 3GS, but I'm not going to upgrade for that].

Video Recording

‘Cycorder’. Nuff said.

Folders!

This is obvious. Why Apple didn’t build this into the system, I have no idea. As any iPhone owner is aware, one of the greatest features about the iPhone is all the apps that are available. There are thousands of them. The only downside is that the more apps you have, the more space they take up on the screen. Before I jailbroke my iPhone, I had up to 10 windows that I had to scroll through to find the app I was looking for. Now I only have two windows (I got rid of 3 windows by simply creating a “games” folder). The app I use for folders is called ‘categories’. It’s an easy to use folder creator that even let’s you choose from a library of icons.

Notifications

This is probably the biggest time saver for me. In order to see if you missed a phone call, received an email, or got a text message, you have to unlock your phone, possibly type in a password, and look in various places. This is a little ridiculous if you ask me. With a jailbreak iPhone, you can download an app called ‘StatusNotifier’ which displays little icons next to your battery status. Even on your lockscreen! Duh!

Theme Customization

Who doesn’t enjoy customizing their wallpaper, right? Well, with ‘Winterboard’, you can do a lot more than that. I won’t go into all the details, but what I love the most is changing the wallpaper, customizing the look of the dock, and getting rid of all the text below the buttons. The possibilities are endless.

Easier Settings Adjustments

In the same way ‘StatusNotifier’ saves time, so does ‘SBSettings’. With the flick of your finger, a little window appears that lets you turn on and off wifi, 3G,  location services, and much much more. And just like ‘StatusNotifier’, this can all be done from the lockscreen. AMAZING!

Are those reasons enough? If so, now comes the fun and easy part…

How?

This takes about 5 minutes, but I would set aside an hour because that’s how long you will want to play with your phone once you’re done ;-)

Visit this link to start: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=2311

I have an iPhone 3G and a Mac, so I downloaded RedSn0w to jailbreak, which I hear is the easiest way to do it. Basically, you download RedSn0w and the latest OS release for the iPhone (currently version 3.0). Then you run RedSn0w, follow the easy-to-follow directions, and 5 minutes later you’re done. Don’t worry, the link above will walk you through all the details.

Check out this little video…