New Article at UXMag.com

Belated notice on this, but go read my new(ish) article about the design challenges facing the iPad as an e-reader. It's up at UXMag.com.

Launchpad, Reminders, Notes and the Dock in Mountain Lion

By now I'm used to new versions of OS X inserting the latest and greatest into the Dock. This time, the first boot of Mountain Lion populated my Dock (which is pinned to the side in its 2D glory, as it should be) with icons for Launchpad, Notes, and Reminders. As a result, there are more shiny objects, making the Dock objects I use for launching or switching apps even tinier and smaller to hit. So I tried dragging Launchpad out of the Dock, expecting it to vanish in a puff of virtual smoke. (I should note that this is an expectation that Mac OS X has taught me.) But no go. The Launchpad icon just rubber-banded back to the Dock. Same with Notes and Reminders.

Are we stuck with Dock spam? Well, no.

You can still click-and-hold (or right-click) on these Dock icons, navigate Options->Remove from Dock and there you go.

But... why is this the case? Why is Apple breaking behaviors they taught us? Is this a subtle signal that Launchpad will be the way of the future, and Apple is training us to rely on Launchpad? Is this another hint for iOS-ification conspiracy theorists?

Lion Hates Me

I saw some apps not responding, so I tried to sample the processes (so I could hand the data off to a more savvy friend). Note that in neither of these screen shots was the cursor over the highlighted Time Machine Menu Bar item; I'd clicked on it in an attempt to suspend backing up, in hopes that that would lessen the load on the poor laptop, but that just made things worse. The whole thing started when iTunes wouldn't launch, so after a few minutes of the icon bouncing in the Dock, I used Activity Monitor to get it to quit. The next dozen times I tried to relaunch it, there was that lovely error message.

The computer sat like this, with eventually the Finder being unresponsive, for 10-12 minutes before I forced a reboot.

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I'm Not Super Happy with the Lion Upgrade

In the two years I've had this Macbook Pro (basic model), I've had to restart maybe a half-dozen times total, with only two force restarts. That is, until I upgraded to Lion. Problems with the new Mail UI aside (the old Mail with WideMail could show half again as many items in the Inbox at once), I've seen serious RAM usage and have had to force restart twice in the last week. Any suggestions? I've booted from the install DVD I made according to Apple's own instructions and run Disk Utility and tried to make sure I have current versions of all apps.

Note that only three apps are running, and over half my installed RAM is Active. One more app and the OS starts going to my hard drive for memory.

I tried logging out to clear the RAM use. This is what it looked like for 10 minutes. I had to force restart.