Upgrade to Lion

[Colin Holgate]

I seem to be having a different experience with Lion than many here. I too was reluctant to change my way of scrolling, or to give up on using Rosetta apps, and so had not yet upgraded to Lion. I usually grab OSX updates very early on (as a piece of trivia, I was the first person anywhere, including the OS team themselves, to be running Mac OS 7 full time), but this time I held off, until there came appoint when I wanted to try publishing to iPad Retina. Then I didn't have a choice. At first I ran it on an external SSD drive, and found that the apps I needed to use ran fine, and that adjusting to the gestural based scrolling took no time at all. It's also very nice to be able to swipe left or right to go through your browser history, instead of having to mouse over to click on the arrow buttons. The pinch to zoom of web pages is good too.

Having got a little used to Lion I then felt better about trying out Mountain Lion. My current setup is that I have 10.8 on my internal SSD, and still have 10.7.4 on the external SSD. I still need that because under 10.8 you can't publish iOS apps, as it's using the prerelease Xcode 3.4. With this setup I am able to run, as an example, Mail, Safari, Xcode, Director, Flash, LiveCode, Parallels, and IE and SketchUp under Parallels, all without any slowing down on my 4GB MacBook Air. I can get by with that!