Mac OSx 10.7 Lion July 21, 2011 Tweet

Today Apple released Mac OSx 10.7 Lion. I thought it would be useful for others to see the steps to upgrade OSx and a Software Developer’s take on the new OS.

Installation Steps

If you are not on Snow Leopard, you will have to upgrade first. Once you are on Snow Leopard and have all the latest updates installed, open App Store application and buy the Mac OSx Lion. For $29.99, I consider this a very good deal!

The installer is about 3.74GB in size and it took me 35 mins to download it. Once it is downloaded and you click the Install button, you will see this screen.

Then click Continue.

Click Agree. You will be prompted for your mac user password. Enter it.

Click Install and first the installer will start preparing for the install.

Once it’s complete you will have to restart the OS to begin the installation.

Once you click Restart, it will close any open applications.

Once it restarts, the installation automatically starts, which takes about 30 mins.

Once the installation is complete, you will greeted at first by the Setup Assistant.

Here you will have to move your mouse over the text that describes how scrolling works and using two fingers scroll down to a button that  says something like continue using Lion, which when you click will finish the Setup Assistant.

Post Installation thoughts

As a software developer I first checked if all my developer apps still worked. When I started IntelliJ, I was prompted to install java. Once I did that, IntelliJ worked just fine.

I also use NX Client quite a bit at work and the current GA version is not supported in Lion anymore. Nomachine released a preview version that is already working for me on Lion though. So, I am all set.

As for the Lion look and feel, Mission control and the ability to create and remove desktops are the most useful to me. I have several apps running at any given point of time and now it does get a lot more convenient to organize them in a way that I can get to them quickly.

The scroll direction is opposite though and I don’t like it. It was easy to revert that by going to System Preferences > Trackpad > Scroll & Zoom and disable the “Scroll direction: natural”.

Finally, it was time for me to check if my test automation tools (what this site really focuses on) continued to work on Lion.  As you might remember Selenium 1.0.1 stopped working after Snow Leopard was released. It was eventually fixed with the release of Selenium 1.0.3. I was glad to see that Selenium 2.3.0 did have any problems with Lion.