On Jun 23, 2012, at 14:19 , Lee Larson wrote:

> On Jun 23, 2012, at 1:06 PM, Marta Edie wrote:
> 
>> Guys, I need some help, and somewhere and somehow one who should be able to 
>> guide a person through these obstacles. Is anybody from the group as utterly 
>> unhappy as I am? 
> 
> As Bill pointed out, a lot of the old behavior can be resurrected in the 
> preferences.
> 
> For the most part, I like Lion. I liked the new reverse scrolling at once 
> because it make more sense to me. There are several things I dislike about 
> Lion.
> 
> For example, the full screen mode for programs is brain dead, if you have 
> multiple monitors. The program zooms out to fill in the monitor with the menu 
> bar and the other one becomes useless.
> 
> There's too much hidden in the interface that has to be discovered more or 
> less by just clicking around. An example of this is in mail where the command 
> to open and close the mailbox views for each account doesn't show up until 
> you hover over the name of the account in the sidebar. The Mac interface used 
> to be famous for making programs usable without a manual. Now the commands 
> are hidden and there is no manual.

Even worse (and pertinent to Marta's complaint) is that the nice uniform 
interface which made jumping from application to application on the Mac much 
nicer than in Windows or (ugh) Linux seems to have eroded away slowly but 
surely. Also, the nice 'use the menu bar at the top of the screen' has been 
replaced by the slow 'use the widget that you have to aim at carefully', which 
defeats the speed of a graphical user interface. A triumph of design over 
functionality.

> The restoration of the state of a program at launch should be fine-tuned to 
> be per program instead of just globally on or off. (Yes, I know about 
> option+splat+Q, before somebody brings it up.)

I did stumble upon this on the web, though it certainly is not, uh, 
user-friendly. Typing the following in Terminal will reverse the roles of cmd-Q 
and option-cmd-Q for Safari in particular:

  defaults write com.apple.Safari NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

In general, the following seems to work, where you need to substitute the name 
of the company (in lowercase) for $company, and the name of the application 
(capitalized properly) for $application:

  defaults write com.$company.$application NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Swapping 'true' for 'false' will turn the default behavior back on.

Of course, this all smacks much more of using OS/2 or Unix than of using a nice 
shiny new Mac OS X.

> Multiple desktops always act mysteriously. All too often I’m whisked off to a 
> different desktop when I’m opening a window in a program. Sometimes the 
> program already has a window open in the new desktop. More often, I don’t  
> see any reason why I was taken there. Maybe I just don’t  know the proper way 
> to hold my mouth when opening a window.

I've only seen this if the application's default desktop assignment is to a 
different desktop other than the desktop which has open windows. It seems that 
this preference can get corrupted between Snow Leopard and Lion. To fix it, you 
can move the windows from the application to the proper desktop and then assign 
the default desktop from the Dock icon (!?). 
(Lee has probably seen this already, but has had more problems than me. I don't 
use that many applications.)

The one thing I do like about the desktops is that if you hit F9, you can drag 
the icon of the application to another desktop to move all the windows. Perhaps 
this was in Snow Leopard, but I never knew about it.

Bill

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