It is surely commendable for Apple to want to unify the iOS and OS X as much as possible. That makes it easier for users of both to switch back and forth on a regular basis. Certainly, adding loads of new gestures to Lion was designed to speed the process, assuming you care to take the time to learn some of them. That also assumes that you are using Apple’s own input devices for the most part, to take advantage of most of these features.

At the same time, you can be assured that there are loads and loads of tips and tricks designed to change the setups, not just with Apple’s own visible settings, but with Terminal hacks and third party utilities.

The other day, for example, I read an article specifying 18 different ways to make your user level Library folder visible (a 19th has since be added). It’s quite a worthy effort, actually, although you might wonder what the fuss is all about.

You see, your ~/Library folder is a place where cache files, preference files, email files, and loads of other data is stored. It’s an easy place to visit if something goes wrong on your Mac, but removing the wrong preference file may revert an app to its default settings — or force you to reenter a registration serial number. Removing a file in Application Support may render an app unusable, forcing you to reinstall. I suspect Apple fielded lots of support calls from Mac users who had messed with this folder and did something wrong, so they decided to make it harder to reach. So with Lion, the visibility “flag” is turned off. You can’t see it without performing a few tricks.

To keep it simple, the best way to find that folder is simply to click on the desktop, hold down Option and you’ll see Library in the Go menu. Forget about all the other steps, because that’s a place you will seldom need to visit, and if you’re not a fairly skilled Mac user, you should avoid it altogether unless you are following the directions of a support person, a magazine or online article, or a book. Even then, the support person might be the best resource to help you solve a problem.

When it comes to scrolling, Apple decided to take a natural approach, meaning that the OS X version mimics the iPhone and iPad’s behavior. So you move your fingers up to travel towards the bottom of a document, and down to get to the top. Instinctive I suppose for new users, but the opposite of the method traditionally employed in graphical operating systems for decades. Getting used to scrolling upward to see a document move up on your Mac takes some getting used to. I avoided it for a while, before giving in, more or less.

Now maybe Apple expected Mac users to understand the change, which can be jarring at first brush. But they don’t put up a warning prompt on the first scroll. They leave it for you to discover, just as you might discover the option in the Mouse and Trackpad preference panels that says, “Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating.” Uncheck that option, and scrolling reverses itself, thus restoring the old ways.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide which way is better.

There’s yet another set of behavior defaults that might cause confusion, the ability to restore windows when you relaunch an app. Now this is a native Lion feature that may or may not work on the apps you use, depending on whether they were upgraded to Lion versions. But some apps, such as Adobe InDesign 5.5, and Word 2011, seem to support the restore feature for the most part, although they are not yet Lion savvy, and here’s where things get dicey.

Just imagine that you had half a dozen documents opened in InDesign, which is quite pokey about launching and opening documents. So you launch InDesign, and you may wait long minutes for all those documents to reopen, whether you want them to or not. One solution is to hold down Option when you quit the app, which reverses the function, meaning windows aren’t reopened. If you tire of this mostly global resume feature, visit the General preference pane and uncheck “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps.” After you’ve done that, an Option Quit will reverse the procedure, meaning the windows will be reopened at next launch.

Unfortunately, resuming and not resuming may not be consistent. Your mileage will vary. Some of that is due to the apps themselves, and some of it may be due to lingering bugs in Lion. I suppose the picture will clear up somewhat when 10.7.1 ultimately arrives, whenever that is.

My biggest criticism about the whole thing, as you can see, is changing expected behavior in Lion updates without a clear warning. Not every Mac user is tuned in to such matters. Maybe it makes sense on a clean install, or when you set up a new Mac, but I expect these serious changes will be fodder for a fair number of service calls, at least in the early days. Maybe I’m wrong, but Apple shouldn’t assume all or most Mac users have studied the fineries of Lion and know what to expect.

The scenario isn’t uncommon. Your Mac is suffering from constant crashes, or other system anomalies, so you decide, or a technical support person suggests, that you reinstall the OS. In the past, this wasn’t so serious an issue. You got your most recent system DVD, mounted it, and launched the installer.

With Lion the rules have changed, but not necessarily in a way that you might appreciate.

As you know, Lion is strictly an online purchase and download. There are no physical discs, although there will be a USB thumb drive version some time in August for a “mere” $69. In passing, I will not attempt to guess out why Apple requires a $40 premium to supply Lion on a USB device that can be purchased for less than $10 at most retailers. I understand the greed factor, but maybe they plan to bundle other goodies in that package, maybe even support installations from older OS X versions.

But when it comes to a reinstallation, when Lion is placed on your Mac’s drive, there is also a tiny partition that can be used to boot your Mac in case of an emergency. Getting there involves restarting and holding down Command-R (or holding down Option and selecting Recovery HD) during the startup process. Simple enough.

You will reboot into a simple system that handles several recovery and maintenance features, such as running Disk Utility to not just examine but make simple directory repairs on your startup drive. This isn’t something you can do while booted under Lion. Yes, you can also restart in “command line” mode and accomplish a similar task, but this solution is simpler, not to mention more elegant.

The most important options, though, are recovery and reinstallation. If you opt to just start over, erase the drive, reinstall Lion and copy your stuff, you’ll need a current Time Machine backup. Don’t have one? Well, that’s the only restore process offered. Sorry ’bout that.

But the option to reinstall Lion is the one most likely used, and therein lies the problem. You see, Apple doesn’t store a full installer in this hidden partition, no doubt to reduce the physical size. That’s a good idea if you have a MacBook Air, particularly the model with 64GB of storage. Every bit saved helps, but at what cost?

If you must reinstall Lion, Apple will first verify your Apple ID, after which the latest Lion will be retrieved. The obvious advantage is that, if there is a later version of Lion when you perform the reinstallation, that’s the one you’ll get. You won’t have to perform a double install. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reinstalled the OS for myself or someone else, only to see Software Update offer to download yet a later version.

But what if you don’t have a broadband connection? What if you acquired Lion from a visit to your local Wi-Fi hotspot, an Apple store, or someone made a copy for you? What can you do then?

Obviously, the Recovery HD will be of no use to you if you cannot download Lion. If that’s your situation, you’d have to use a physical disc, if you have one. Or go without.

I suppose for most Mac users, these restrictions aren’t serious. But there are millions of potential Lion users who will chafe at the limitation. Maybe that will be sufficient reason for Apple to sell loads of USB versions of Lion, at least to those who are unable to retrieve online versions in an efficient fashion.

All in all, however, Recovery HD is actually quite a good idea for most Lion users. I don’t expect it’ll be used that often, but it’s a good safety net. And, yes, as a matter of testing, I did do a reinstallation of Lion several hours after the original installation just to evaluate the process in the real world. To me, everything went fine, but I also have quite a speedy broadband connection.

Apple could improve the process by not deleting the Lion installer after installation. That seems a wrongheaded approach, though I grant that Apple does the very same thing with the iOS. Sure, you can duplicate the Lion installer, and toss it to a location other than the Applications folder, and be safe; there are even hacks to make a bootable DVD. But why? Why can’t Apple, as part of the installation process, include a checkbox where you specify whether you want to keep the installer or not.

Besides, even if you do have a really fast broadband connection, some of you may also confront bandwidth limits. If you download Lion a few times, at 3.5GB each, and purchase or stream a bunch of high definition movies, you may find yourself stuck. For example, Comcast, a major U.S. cable provider, puts a limit of 250GB on many of their broadband customers. Only a few percent are apt to approach those limits, but if you exceed that number repeatedly, I’m informed you may lose your Internet access for an extended period of time

Lion on a USB drive seems more tempting, if only Apple would price it sensibly.

As OS launches go, Lion appears to be quite successful, particularly when it comes to sales. Yes, there are scattered reports of those infamous version 1.0 bugs, but not the show-stoppers some might have feared. Regardless, some are curious issues, such as the unfortunately predictable crashes reported by author Kirk McElhearn whenever he attempts to view movies on his new 27-inch iMac. His temporary solution is not to do that!

Performance readings are all over the map, with some testers reporting that Lion is somewhat slower than Snow Leopard, while others claim it’s actually a little faster. Since part of this disparity might be blamed on the kind of Mac you’re using, I suppose graphics driver updates might be needed to set things right. At least there doesn’t seem to be a trend indicating Lion is demonstrably slower than previous OS X versions, despite the added visual eye candy and possible system bloat.

My personal encounters have been fairly straightforward. I have had to restart my work computer, a 2009 27-inch iMac, a few extra times to eliminate performance anomalies, but I’m still updating software. Just the other day, I installed version 3.4 of the Logitech Control Center, which supposedly makes that utility compatible with Lion. On the other hand, my MX Revolution mouse seemed to operate with all the custom tracking speeds and button mappings intact before I ran that update. But with drivers of this sort, some of those random system slowdowns might have been caused by using the older version.

Among the new features, I’m not enamored of the way downloads are handled. In the past, if you selected the “Open ‘safe’ files after downloading option,” it would actually do something. Disk images would mount, installers would open. Yes, you could turn it off if you feared you were making your Mac vulnerable to malware, but I haven’t seen it function since Lion, which contains Safari 5.1, was installed.

With Lion, your downloads jump into a tiny shaded down arrow at the upper right of the Safari window, under which you see a tiny dark blue progress bar. After the download completes, nothing. If you click on the arrow, you’ll see a listing of recent downloads. Double click on the one you want to launch it, or click the magnifying glass icon to see where the file is located, which is the Downloads folder unless you specified another place to receive those files.

Microsoft apps seem to have fared decently, at least if you have Office 2008 and Office 2011. A previous version, Office 2004, arrived before the Intel revolution, and won’t run under Lion, because of the disappearance of the Rosetta PowerPC translation software. While it appears Microsoft will address the lingering bugs with the two more recent releases, they have yet to say when they will support such native Lion features as Auto-Save and Full Screen Apps.

I also expect Adobe will take their sweet time delivering Lion upgrades for their most recent software suites, particularly since they tend to use customized developer tools.

One particularly disconcerting bug was the erroneous messages that my business printer, a Xerox Phaser 8560DN, was out of ink whenever I printed a document. Xerox support confirmed this bug in Snow Leopard, and it wasn’t fixed in Lion until just a few days ago, when I discovered that new 10.7 driver package had been posted. Xerox support didn’t bother to let me know, even though I made that request. The only caution, though, is that you go to the Print & Fax preference pane and remove the printer before running the installer. Not to worry, it’ll be added again at the end of the installation process. Unfortunately, the problem only disappeared for a single day, after which it returned. So much for that update.

Another curious issue — or missing feature — is the inability to name a desktop when used for the Spaces feature in Mission Control. Yes, you can drag an app to a new desktop. You can even change the desktop background by dragging System Preferences to the same desktop. But Apple’s own videos and online descriptions reveal desktops with custom names. Whether artistic license or a feature yet to arrive in Lion isn’t yet known.

I’ve also been unable to configure the Lion version of iChat, version 6.0, to recognize my Face-book account. It works fine in AIM, an app not yet updated for Lion. Yes, the setups are correct, so far as I can determine, but it chokes on my username and password.

In the meantime, there were published reports over the weekend that Apple has seeded registered Mac developers with a 10.7.2 update, which is said to be designed to support iCloud, the MobileMe replacement promised for this fall. Whether or not there are other fixes isn’t known.

But where is 10.7.1? We’ll, it’s also widely known that the actual release version of 10.7 was completed several weeks ago, when it was made available to developers. One assumes Apple shifted resources to 10.7.1 as soon as work on the original release was finished, so it may well be that we’ll be seeing that update within days or at most a few weeks.

So there’s a statement credited to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt that Apple is trying to sue its way to success rather than innovate. Curious, and crazy, among other things.

Curious in that the Android OS is obviously heavily influenced by the iOS, and has been from the very first day. Sure, Google acquired Android several years earlier, and it’s clear their target then was Microsoft, not Apple. The arrival of the iPhone changed everything. Does Schmidt he really expect people to believe that Apple doesn’t innovate?

Sure, it’s easy to find telltale influences, or inspirations, in Apple’s operating systems. The Window menu, for example, appeared in Windows ahead of the Mac OS. Being able to resize a document from all corners of the screen in Lion was also offered in Windows first, but I don’t expect that Microsoft is ready to sue Apple for “borrowing” a few look end feel concepts. And, yes, the new Notification feature in iOS 5 was clearly inspired by the Android OS, but that’s not nearly enough to justify Schmidt’s claims that Apple doesn’t innovate.

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