Hmm, clicking on words in Dictionary.app works for me. What about TextEdit, any peculiarities there, either with hyperlinks or click & drag? Might want to check Console and see if anything strange is being reported.
Update: I clean-installed Lion, and am happy I did. Much more snappy, no unexplained crashes (yet) and that sense of purity and virtue that comes with only loading a few essential apps.
Like all my attempts at purity and virtue, it won’t last long.
You might try wearing a white smock while writing. Might improve your success rate.
Dave
Ioa, this is something I need to do. I upgraded my 13" MBA to Lion and all seemed to go smoothly; and apart from ignoring Launchbar totally, I like what I’ve found.
However, when I went to do my bootable system back-up I ran into problems. I have used Synchronize! X Pro happily for years — and contrary it seems to some people’s experience, I have found Hugh Sontag very courteous and extremely helpful — without problem. But having installed Lion, the log file reported some 450 errors of various kinds; I then erased the destination volume and ran it again, which reduced the total to 150 errors of “path not found” type. I wrote to Hugh Sontag and he said that in all their user tests, the version I have works without problem under Lion, so I assume all this is cruft which has built up under SL.
Accordingly, I want to do a clean install of Lion. The question is, how do I restore the Lion installer to some sort of external drive? How big is it; if I use a USB flash drive how big does it need to be? How do I go about the whole thing? Is there some kind of cheat-sheet anywhere that you can point me to, please?
Thanks
Mark
The dirt is within.
Besides, what’s the point of working from home if you can’t wear working clothes be-scunged with four days of farm grime, as I am now?
Mark,
Macworld has an extensive set of articles on installing Lion.
Dave
I think I read something about that…
Here is what I think you need: support.apple.com/kb/dl1433
You’ll need a CD or usb thumb drive with at least 1G of free space.
Regarding that Apple document, I had no luck with using the restore disk, which is a little unnerving. It would go so far as to download the ~4GB data files necessary to perform the full installation, but then it would crap out and forget that it downloaded anything. I tried this three times before giving up. Maybe I just had bad luck; in theory that should work, but like everything else that came directly out of the App Store—I guess I got the unlucky end of the stick because the whole process was a mess for me.
The trick that I found is to, from Snow Leopard, download the Lion installer, but not run it. This is a pretty good guide for how to do so. You’ll need a stick drive that has at least a 4gb capacity, which is where I ran into problems.
I used the recovery feature on the Mac Mini to reinstall Lion and was far from impressed about the fact that it had to download the installer again… Took about five hours the second time I downloaded it. To be honest, I’d rather see that recovery partition grow by 4 GB and store a copy of the installer… but that’s me.
I’ve thought about doing a fresh install on my MBP, but don’t have time right now to deal with reinstalling everything. I kept a copy of the installer, so I don’t have to redownload it, but I don’t have a spare 8GB thumb drive…
Anyone install from a thumb drive? I think I tried on the mini and couldn’t get it to work very well…
Josh
Yeah, I second that. I would not at all mind if there was an option to download the very latest copy of the OS to use for installation—that would be pretty spiffy as you wouldn’t have to take that extra step later on after you’ve got things up and running of cycling through Software Update over and over to get everything up to speed—but it really is dumb to have a “recovery disk” that is really only a boot shell that is 100% non-function without the Internet and an App Store log-in. Very narrow minded and broadband user centric.
Apologies is this has already been mentioned, but there is a way to save the install disc after downloading Lion (so that you don’t have to download again for a re-install). The trick is you have to do it after the initial download, but before installing. The instructions are here: osxdaily.com/2011/06/08/create-b … sc/#jmp0
Briefly, they are as follows:
I think people are missing the point here. Launchpad is useful - provided that you have a magic trackpad. The trackpad integrates beautifully with all the Lion gestures.
Its the future folks.
Its the future folks.
Maybe for some people, like not having a real keyboard is an okay future for some people too. Ever tried using Photoshop or something with a trackpad though? It’s… okay if you have nothing else, but it’s not a replacement for a mouse or tablet. Anyway, that aside, I don’t see what gestures help out here. It is just as easy—easier I would say, since you don’t have to reposition your hand after the gesture—to use a mouse wheel.
My main computer is a macbook pro, which spends most of its life as my desktop machine, attached to an external monitor. I mainly use it with a keyboard and trackpad, though I do have a mouse attached for those photoshop moments. I am not disagreeing with you there. I have very quickly become used to using the new gestures on the trackpad, particularly when using full screen apps that you can just swipe out of the way and onto the next screen. Doing the 4 finger pinch to bring up launchpad is quick and intuitive and faster than using everyone’s favourite Launchbar if you don’t happen to have your fingers on the keyboard. The same goes for using the macbook with its big trackpad away from the home desk.
Contrast with my mac mini, which I use in my office at work, with a standard keyboard and mouse. There is no way to swipe between screens. If I am in full screen mode I need to press esc to get out of it so that I can see other apps. Using Launchbar or even spotlight to launch apps is way quicker than clicking on the Launchpad icon then clicking on the required app, particularly if you have pages of apps. The mini + mouse + keyboard feels stunted compared to my macbook + trackpad.
My point is simply that those Lion adoptees who are not seeing how some of the newer features can be useful are possibly not being fair on the OS, as in my experience it is just made for using with a trackpad.
As I said, its the future 
I have previously installed Lion on two of my machines, and today did it for my beloved spouse and writing partner. She is not as enamored of IT as me and wants everything as simple as possible. She is also a whiz on the iPad and prefers its interface.
So, before installing I ran all Snow Leopard updates and made a full backup to an external drive. Then I set up smart folders in the Sidebar to display all Pages, Scrivener, Doc and Docx files, by last date opened. That will help her to find recent files quickly.
After installing Lion, I went to System Preferences and turned off Mission Control completely. To me, that is the least useful tool in the entire package, at least on a big iMac screen. Then I placed on her Dock only these icons, left to right: System Preferences, Launch Pad, Dashboard, Downloads, Public.
She launched Safari, then Mail, and a few other apps and declared herself pleased. We also set up a new Desktop Picture (Lake). Spotlight took a while to update its index, and she was in business. All the apps run faster, and she likes the remembered files feature. While it’s taken me weeks to adjust to Lion, she did it in just an hour. I am a most fortunate Scrivener.
Neither of your statements here are correct—but I’ll let that sit for a minute. More importantly, I fail to see the relevance to how any of this makes Launch Pad better with gestures, over the use of a mouse wheel? What does Mission Control or Full Screen have to do with this?
I’m assuming the only gesture in Launch Pad is swiping pages of icons—I’ve not found anything else anyway. Again, the mouse wheel does flipping quite well, and like I say you can do it without waving your hand around, but since you didn’t comment on this I’ll spell it out a bit further: you can do it and move the pointer at the same time—so if you know where the icon is spatially located (which you might not always due to problems in the grid layout design) on page 3 you can be moving your pointer to the right quadrant of the screen while flipping pages. Can’t do that with gestures. It’s a small thing, but given how simple of an action we are talking about here, that’s the only clear case where the two methods are substantially different—and in this case the mouse with a wheel wins. Therefore: how does using a trackpad suddenly “solve” Launch Pad, when the only thing a trackpad actually does for Launch Pad is in fact inferior (minor though the inferiority may be) to the alternative?
Another problem entirely with Launch Pad in relation to trackpad usage is that the Apple mono-button trackpad’s major weakness is long drags. Dragging an icon more than an inch or two is difficult because you have to maintain a lot of pressure with your finger (and you have to vary that pressure as you move up and down the Y axis as more force is required at the top than at the bottom)—but not so much pressure that you generate too much friction. You can alleviate this a bit by clicking with your thumb in the lower-left corner and leave the finger free to move about in a more agile and “reset to move further” manner; an essentially ability. Still, it is not at elegant as using a mouse button to activate a drag action and letting go to drop; accuracy is reduced and the thumb pegs your hand in a way that can cause contortions with some vectors. Since Launch Bar fills the entire screen with massive icons, organising them is more difficult with a trackpad because the chances for needing very long drag events is high—and accuracy is lower when dragging on a trackpad, increasing the odds of playing whack the mole where icons are bouncing all around, trying to accommodate a drop zone (needless whiz bang; this animation serves no purpose) instead of allowing a drop-on.
But coming back to Mission Control, since you brought that up, I don’t find hitting F3 to be that difficult. Press the button, select the Space, click. Likewise, Ctrl-RightArrow and Ctrl-LeftArrow to switch in a linear fashion (what the swipe gesture accomplishes). If I’m using the mouse, then F3 is usually faster and that allows non-linear access as well. But I use mice with buttons plural, so it is trivial to add gesture-access features to various buttons—a mouse wheel that rocks left and right is fantastic for Space switching—especially since it utilises the same mechanics described in the superiority of wheel paging over gesture paging. I can be moving the mouse to where I know the application window I want will be once I finish switching to that space. Gestures don’t allow that; buttons do.
You definitely do not have to escape full screen to see other applications on your computer. I’m not aware of any condition that requires that, and all of the methods for doing so are generally more flexible and efficient than gesturing out of full screen. I suspect you might just not be aware of how much your Mac can do without gestures. Yeah, if you think the only way to flip between spaces is with a trackpad—then okay I can see how you would think the keyboard and mouse is crippled—-but we’ve been flipping between virtual desktops using the mouse and keyboard for… well since before Mac OS X was even a pipe dream, let alone Lion over a decade later! I’ve been using virtual desktops and screens since the mid ’90s—and most of the original implementations are still superior to Spaces and Mission Control—but that is another topic.
In most cases, gestures are just different. I don’t see them as ground-breaking at all in the way that Apple has implemented them, or necessarily superior. They aren’t always inferior either. I’ve pointed out how I see the mouse wheel and rocking buttons to be superior for scrolling over gestures, especially in the Launch Pad scenario where moving the pointer while scrolling can be very useful—but gestures can be a decent equal replacement for other things. I wouldn’t necessary say that Ctrl-Arrows and F3 are superior to Left/Right/Up swipes—certainly not in all scenarios and maybe inferior in a few, but on the whole about the same. And if you turn off that blasted feature that shuffles Spaces according to usage, then Ctrl-# keys are, in my opinion, superior to all of the above in every single way.
But again, I don’t understand what application switching and Mission Control have to do with the Launch Pad implementation. So I’m probably missing a crucial point here.
I wouldn’t disagree with the first assertion, though I don’t see how it follows that this proves the superiority of a trackpad and laptop keyboard over a standard keyboard and mouse. Nor do I see how the equipment (Mini vs. MacBook) makes a huge difference (peripherals aside). LaunchBar is, for me, always going to be unquantifiably but reliably more efficient than any mouse based launching or data movement mechanism. I would far rather move, copy, zip, unzip, e-mail, send to programs, etc with LaunchBar than waving icons around on a screen—but that’s just the way I roll. Others may not feel the same.
You assert that LaunchBar isn’t as efficient when you are on the mouse: I’m not sure how that is; that observation doesn’t bear out in my experience. The shortcut to instantiate a session is Cmd-Space, so the left hand is already capable of triggering it without the right. Further, it is often possible due to excessive abbreviation training, to launch or access things with one or two keystrokes after that—the left hand can usually manage all of this just fine; and the enter/return key is very intentionally used to invoke LB. Why? Because that is the one key you can reliably and easily whack with your thumb while using the mouse. So even if I’m already holding the mouse and I don’t want to let go of the mouse, LB is probably 98 to 99% as efficient as having both hands on the keyboard. Being at the mouse is a negligible drop in efficiency, and statistically it is probably safe to say there is no meaningful drop. Meanwhile, 4 finger pinch? That’s the most difficult one to correctly pull off, at least for me. I can never hit that gesture on the first shot; but that is a personal problem so I’m not weighting that too heavily here. But even if Launch Pad were an amazing innovative improvement to typing in ‘F’ to launch Firefox, just the access gesture for it is maddening. I’d rather use LaunchBar to fire up Launch Pad which is just too silly to even contemplate. A gesture definitely requires you to already be using the pointer, not typing. So in the majority of times when a writer is writing, it’s the wrong tool because you have to switch input devices to access it.
All right, so maybe the keyboard isn’t your thing. That’s totally fine. LaunchBar isn’t for everyone—it’s a kind of dorky tool in that it is largely interface-less and has very little discovery value. Icons and such can be superior if these are important to your experience.
So, if you want a full screen application launcher—just open up your Applications folder as a Finder window, set it to always open in Icons mode, and organise your application icons spatially and in a way that makes sense to you—fill the screen with the window if you want. Cluster your graphics programs together into a spot over here, and your writing programs into a spot over there. They will always be where you put them—spatial importance. Now if you want to launch an application, just Cmd-Shift-A (or assign that shortcut to a gesture if that pleases you), and Option-click on the thing you want to launch. Done.
We’ve been capable of doing that since the introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984. Launch Pad adds nothing to the computer experience. That is what people are complaining about. It’s not superior in any way to what I just described, it’s woefully inferior in nearly every way, and it wasted Apple’s time on things they could have spent elsewhere—like fixing text engine bugs that have been plugging up Lists and Tables since 2004. You know, just fixing up the OS they’ve already got, rather than jumping all over with these hokey cellular phone inspired implementations where one calls thing “Apps” instead of “Applications” to save screen space and the 1/2” of your index finger getting mashed against a piece of glass is the absolutely most precise thing you can do to interact with your device.
The main contentions are with Launch Pad and the gutted Spaces implementation, I would say. In both cases the failures and flaws of these two really have little to do with the input mechanism (stuff like a long line of Spaces instead of a grid, reducing immediate accessibility, is not solved by gestures because gestures are actually the weakest way to navigate in the first place, being incapable of random access. Or that coupling random access methods with an extremely heavy UI dramatically reduces how efficient it is; if you have to wait seconds for Mission Control to fully load, just to switch from Space 1 to 4, then you’ve slaughtered the whole point of discovery necessitated random access; again, gestures cannot solve a problem in the domain of over-zealous faffing about with CoreAnimation causing performance issues; I had nice fancy previews of desktops (that I could actually manipulate to manage more than one VM at once!) in a VM widget in 1998 running on a Pentium II 400mhz that blows Mac OS X Lion out of the water in performance). That is where I’m confused about with your argument. Flipping between pages in Launch Pad is hardly a problem as a pure implementation itself—i.e. the actual Stuff Done to switch pages. It is paging as a concept that is mostly pointless in a computing context, I would argue. Gestures don’t solve the conceptual problem of paging being dumb, especially when the wheel is just as good. There are many other problems with Launch Pad though, and most of them have no gestural access anyway.
Which may of course be dismal. But appliance computing has failed many times over the years. Maybe it is an answer in search of a question; maybe it isn’t; but it doesn’t seem like it will ever get out of device land. Cellular phones, refrigerators, et cetera—never made a dent in computers. Maybe that will change with the right answer, but none of this in Lion really strikes me as being an answer to any problem at all, let alone this one (and I don’t think there is one, as I’ve pointed out. Much of what Lion “introduces” is stuff we’ve been capable of doing for decades in many cases—and better).
I had decided to wait and see about Lion.
Now I’ve decided to not go there.
I have no need.
I’m really happy with SL, and don’t see a need to learn something new (for what it seems to deliver) at this point.
Much as I like Lion - it’s new scrolling direction, Mission Control, fullscreen, etc - I am becoming increasingly convinced it is buggy. Very buggy. I now recommend: wait.
Word crashes every time I quit. Admittedly it did this 4 times out of 5 in SL, but now it always crashes and will crash Microsoft’s bug reporter too. Nice one.
I have now had Lion hang on me several times, something that SL never did. In fact, I think the last time OS X hung on me was Jaguar or Leopard (and that was on a machine with faulty hardware).
On Lion, I have twice tried to update my printer list using Software Update. Each time it has hung, requiring a forced (hardware) restart, which has failed (even the wagon wheel eventually freezes), requiring another forced restart to boot into Lion’s new recovery mode in order to repair permissions just to be able restart my Mac. Not that Lion helps you at all, I just know my Mac well enough to know what to do, heaven help if this happened to my dad. Not cool! It makes me very nervous about any new updates, especially since I still haven’t successfully installed the printer update. 
I can cope without my few remaining PPC apps. I can pretend Launchpad doesn’t exist. I can accept that some of my Magic Mouse swipes now fail. I can accept that AddressBook is now ugly and less functional. Lion’s benefits and “real” (rather than advertised) features more than make up for those. But not stability. I need to know that when I give a lecture, my Mac will work. When I print, my Mac will work. When I open a document, quit an app, or look up the dictionary, my Mac will work. Instead, the best Lion can now offer me is, “Probably, but if I haven’t responded in 10 minutes…”
Yeah, maybe. A dystopian future is more likely than anything else. 
After using Lion for awhile, I’ve come to the conclusion that while it’s okay for those who don’t mind strong-arming their OS, it’s not a good choice for those who just want to get on their Macs and get things done. To that end, I’m not upgrading my kids, who would not appreciate so many of their games and other apps not working and would find the notion of organizing their Launchpad into something useful to be unacceptably tedious (which it is). And I’m definitely not upgrading my mother, who would freak out at the loss of Save As and not understand the confusion of options introduced in its stead.