Like millions of others I have recently taken the $29.99 upgrade to OS X Lion. The upgrade was easy and painless. Getting to grips with Lion has been similarly easy. The big change has been the "natural scrolling." Apple's decision to switch the direction of scrolling was a big deal but you find that after about a week switching back to browsing on a Snow Leopard Mac and you find yourself trying to scroll the wrong way.
There are some strange quirks with OS X Lion so Apple will no doubt be releasing an update fairly quickly. With the last two OS releases we have seen OS X Updates come out within a month of the initial release.
Things to watch out for
Flash Player - The settings panel doesn't want to respond to the mouse cursor.
Network Shares
In order to move data between machines I tried using a network share. There seems to be a quirk where an OS X Lion machine can't connect to another machine running OS X Lion via an AFP: share. Instead you have to switch to using the SMB: windows protocol.
Time Machine Backups
Trying to setup Time Machine to a Time Capsule uncovered a few other quirks. I had an existing Airport Extreme with an external USB drive. I had been using it to do Time Machine Backups. Under Snow Leopard there had been some issues with the shares getting out of Sync. It does look like this has been fixed in Lion. What used to happen is that you had to connect to a share in order to setup Time machine. Then when the the back up starts Time Machine opens up an additional connection to the Share. So instead of connecting to Disk01 Time Machine connects to Disk01-1. This can also happen if there is a power outage and a share isn't tided up in an orderly shutdown.
In trying to setup Time Machine on OS X Lion The first challenge was when connecting to the Airport Extreme disks I got a message:
"The operation can’t be completed because the original item for “Disk01” can’t be found"
The fix for this is to NOT attach to the Airport Extreme via the SHARED section of the sidebar. Instead, Go to the Finder...Go...Network menu item and choose the Airport Extreme and the relevant disk. Connect to the disk. Now go to Time Machine and setup the disk for a Time Machine backup.
Just to be on the safe side, I did disconnect from the network share once the backup had been setup. Time Machine should successfully connect to the drive and perform backups.
((tag: OSX, Lion))
