Concerns about Lion

I have a particular concern about Lion. There a lot of talk about IOS technology coming on board and new levels of sophistication with gestures. But what happens if you don't have a Magic Mouse or Trackpad? Am I going to have problems using Lion with an ordinary mouse and keyboard? Are gestures going to be essential to operating in Lion?

Mikethebook said:

I have a particular concern about Lion. There a lot of talk about IOS technology coming on board and new levels of sophistication with gestures. But what happens if you don't have a Magic Mouse or Trackpad? Am I going to have problems using Lion with an ordinary mouse and keyboard? Are gestures going to be essential to operating in Lion?

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I have no "crystal ball" to know for sure about Lion & gestures...but my guess is you won't have any problems.

There are lots & lots of older MacBooks & MacBook Pros that cannot perform many of the gestures that are available now with OS 10.6...and everything is just fine. The gestures just make doing some things easier...they're not really mandatory to get things done.

All you really need to be able to do is "point & click"...everything else is a bonus. But we will have to see what 10.7 "Lion" brings once it's released.

- Nick

Going back to my concern regarding the possibly mandatory use of gestures in Lion, the WWDC meeting on Monday declared that "we no longer need scroll bars because we can now "push" content using gestures. (Lion's default setting is to show scroll bars only when you gesture to scroll.)" Does this imply that those of us happy with an ordinary mouse and no track pad (I use a Mac Mini) can still use Lion without problems - by changing the default setting? I'm a little wary of how Lion might make things more difficult for me with such a simple set up. Also it seems Lion will require 2GB RAM a huge jump from Snow Leopard's 1GB. Makes me wonder whether an upgrade is worth it.

Yes, you can still use a mouse. Gestures already exist in 10.6, a few even in 10.5. If you're using a mouse now, you'll still be able to use a mouse in 10.7

Mikethebook said:

Going back to my concern regarding the possibly mandatory use of gestures in Lion, the WWDC meeting on Monday declared that "we no longer need scroll bars because we can now "push" content using gestures. (Lion's default setting is to show scroll bars only when you gesture to scroll.)" Does this imply that those of us happy with an ordinary mouse and no track pad (I use a Mac Mini) can still use Lion without problems - by changing the default setting? I'm a little wary of how Lion might make things more difficult for me with such a simple set up.

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My guess would be that, even if there's no scroll-bar control any more (with the scroll-bar only serving as an indicator of location in a page/document) scrolling via a mouse will be a simple case of click+hold grabbing the window content, and dragging it - much like how you currently navigate around a picture which has been zoomed to beyond the size of your display on any OS.

Mikethebook said:

Also it seems Lion will require 2GB RAM a huge jump from Snow Leopard's 1GB. Makes me wonder whether an upgrade is worth it.

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Still less than Windows (well, to get it working properly, anyway!) ;D

Besides, most Apps never use more than 2GB of RAM even when they're really gunning it, so even a relatively "small" by contemporary standards 4GB of RAM will be more than enough for the OS and a resource-intensive App, or several resource-light Apps...

I think it would be worth your money, for all the advanced features, to upgrade your RAM to 4GB - or even 8GB, if your Mini will support that much - but, of course, you don't need to upgrade. I'm sure any new Apps for the forseeable future will still work with Snow Leopard, or even just Leopard.

Ok, so if there needs to be further discussion on this, let's move it to its own thread, since this is all off topic on this one.

Good points. It does sound as though you can elect to have scroll bars showing still and I also have the scroll wheel on my mouse. On the RAM front I will be running Windows XP on Parallels which does take up a chunk of RAM but an upgrade to 8GB should be more than plenty for both systems, I would guess. What tempts me most about Lion is Resume but I'm also going to have fun trying to download the 4GB of Lion. Living out in the sticks in the far north of Scotland, that will take days!!

Note: Moved to it's own thead.

PS. The Magic Mouse (which supports ALL the gestures in Lion) is standard equipment with all new Macs, and is available pretty much everywhere you can buy Mac stuff, not to mention places like Ebay and Craigslist are full of listings for it.

In short, if this is of any concern to you, use the $100 you are saving off what everyone expected to be the list price of Lion and buy a Magic Mouse (or Magic Trackpad, whichever). I love mine.

I've thought about the Magic Mouse but I have large hands and they look small to me. I like my Microsoft mouse.

I would stop worrying. They arent making the mouse obsolete, they are just offering alternatives. you can still use one, you just wont get the fancy pants extra features.

Mikethebook said:

I've thought about the Magic Mouse but I have large hands and they look small to me. I like my Microsoft mouse.

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I'm not aware of any reason why you couldn't have a Bluetooth Magic Trackpad and wired mouse connected to your Mac simultaneously...

(I mean, you can plug more than one mouse into a PC at the same time - if Windows or Linux can deal with that without crashing, I'm sure OSX can...)

That way you'd still have your mouse for precision work, but could use the Trackpad for all the gestures. They're only $69 new, and you could probably pick-up a second-hand one on eBay et al. for around half that...