#FF00AA

Let’s start with blasphemy to put us in a good mood:

The Mac now gains the ability to resize windows from any edge or corner, similar to features exposed over twenty years ago by Jobs’ NeXTSTEP operating system, but which were removed from Mac OS X in order to preserve the look and feel of the original Mac UI.

Not that it’s a bad decision. In fact, I see this as a “We’re having so many switchers thanks to the iPhone and iPad’s halo effect, we need to address the most common of their expectations.” Along with: merging folders instead of overwriting them. Finally.

The most interesting, unannounced bit of “iOS back to the Mac”:

Much like multitasking on Apple’s iOS, Mac OS X may terminate an application behind the scenes when it goes unused or has no open windows. The application usually relaunches instantly when the user accesses it again.

Which explains why the Dock loses its “running lights” (by default). On the one hand, it fixes another OS X quirk that most newcomers were puzzled by (with reason); on the other… there are some bigger, slower apps (like Photoshop, or… well, Photoshop) that take so much time launching that I definitely don’t want them to automatically quit when I’m not using them.

Screenshots: The Address Book is very pretty, and philosophically very wrong. I like the new Quick Look view a lot (good riddance, black overlays). The new buttons, toolbars, controls are quite lickable. And thank god you can choose to show scrollbars all the time. For the record: not being able to know at a glance how much of the content is off-screen is awful UI, always.

Which brings me to this absurdity:

If you organize folders by kind and use the icon mode in Finder, you can scroll through the lists by using a horizontal swipe (see screenshot) that features some Cover Flow-like 3D effects. This doesn’t seem very useful, as you never know how many more apps there are hidden on the left or right side of the window.

2x Graphic Files Found in Lion May Hint at “Retina Display”: odd idea. I know that Apple has tried, and evidently failed, to include resolution independence in OS X for years, and that would be a much more simple, pragmatic solution, but they’re not gonna have Retina versions of the 27-inch Cinema Displays any time soon. Moreover, while on an iOS device the size of interface elements can’t change (because your fingers have a fixed size), the whole point of resolution independence on a computer is to be able to scale the interface — make the menu bar and title bars a little bit bigger or smaller according to taste and eyesight.

But the most puzzling of all is this:

Toggling between different views in Finder, for example, can now be done by dragging and dropping the selector between the four options (a hint at more touchscreen goodness to come?). If you just click on an option instead of dragging the selector, the slider will move into place with a little animation.

You know, that four-state control in the Finder toolbar? If I’m reading this right, you can drag the selection instead of just clicking on the mode you want to use. And why am I focusing on that? Because it makes absolutely zero sense to do this, whether you’re using a mouse or the trackpad: it’s always much more of an effort to drag than simply click a button. The only context where having draggable switches would have the slightest point is a touch-screen Mac.