Mac on the crosseroads

Lion Resources (and a Little Humility)

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:53:00 -0400

As my friends and coworkers will tell you, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with checking my site stats for the past few days. I’m not lying when I say that the four posts I wrote about Lion and the ensuing visitors to this site now account for almost 13% of my total views–since 2008. None of the numbers involved are all that high, mind you, but they’re higher than I really ever thought I’d see on this little old site. Still, it’s hard not to see your view count “skyrocket” and think you’re doing something right and/or helping others who seem to be having similar problems. I’ll admit it: I found some pride somewhere in all this.

Then I went trolling on Google.

It turns out that thecrosseroads.net doesn’t turn up in the first page of search results for pretty much any of the search terms that brought people to the site (which leads me to believe that the users who are finding my site are some pretty persistent people!). And when you do those searches, a lot better people than me have lent their pens to the topic of Lion. Don’t mistake me, though; I’m glad people have found my posts useful, if only so that they know someone else feels the same way they do, notices the same things, and holds the same ideas about how things “should work.”

Anyway, enough about me. Hit the break for a couple of resources that may help you make more sense of Lion.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review - 19 pages of Lion. I haven’t even made it through this one yet.
Mac OS X Lion: in-depth review with pictures (Guardian) I haven’t read this one, but by the size of the scroll-bar it looks to be a rather detailed review.
Egg Freckles - a site one of my coworkers sent me. Don’t like the new look of iCal or Address Book? He shows you how to re-skin them.
Wikipedia’s Lion article - just the facts, ma’am.
Using Spaces on OS X Lion - a nice article that covers how to work with Mission Control. Whereas I assumed readers knew how it all worked and so was only pointing out what I believed are its flaws, he actually shows you how to use it.
Network Link Conditioner in Lion - a neat utility that comes with Lion’s Developer Tools that allows you to simulate various network types.

I’ll add more links as I come across them. The Ars article should keep you tied up for a while, at least…

Mac OS X Lion: My Take, Part IV – App Resume, Auto-Save, Miscellaneous

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 22:11:00 -0400

It’s Sunday and I’m really trying to fight off the urge to go take a nap instead of finishing up my little series on Lion. Over the past couple of days I’ve written down my thoughts on Mission Control; the Mail, iCal, and Address Book apps; and changes in Finder, spelling auto-correct, and some miscellaneous preferences. This final post will concern the new Application/OS Resume, Auto-Save and Versions, and a couple of miscellaneous applications for which I didn’t have enough to say to warrant creating another post.

Miscellaneous Apps

You know, I really thought I had more to write in the “miscellaneous apps” category. It turns out I only have a few things written down, and one of them is really just a product of App Resume that goes away when disabled.

Preview–the sidebar opens on the left now, instead of the right. I have no idea why you would change this, but it’s not that big of a deal. One of my coworkers mentioned that it looks a lot more like Adobe Reader now, which I guess it does.
Terminal–previous scrollback history should not persist when Quitting and restarting the app. You guessed it, this was actually because of App Resume. After disabling that, Terminal no longer exhibited that behavior.
TextEdit refuses to abide by my App Resume setting for one very important case. There are times when all I want to do is open TextEdit, throw some text in there for about five seconds (say, to remove formatting or use it as a scratchpad), then quit the app without saving. With the new TextEdit in Lion, quitting the application without first closing the window (using Cmd-W) will just save whatever text was in the window and display it again the next time I open TextEdit. If I left App Resume enabled, I could see this being correct behavior. However, I disabled App Resume in System Preferences. So why is it saving this data between sessions? It’s getting very annoying.

App/System Resume

App/System Resume is one of those features that sounds great on paper, but ends up being less-than-useful in practice. The idea of being able to start an application–or your Mac–and immediately start where you left off is pretty cool. The problem lies in the reason why I restart applications: I actually want a clean slate. Turns out this is the same reason I reboot. (Well, okay, mainly that’s to patch the OS…or Safari, but don’t get me started on why a browser upgrade should ever need a full system restart.)

So, I like the idea of being able to resume an application right where I left off, but I really don’t want it to be the default behavior. What I’ve found (through spelunking the web) is that you can now use Cmd-Q and Cmd-Opt-Q to quit apps. Governing their behavior is whether Resume is enabled or not in System Preferences. When Resume is enabled, Cmd-Q will quit the app and save state, while Cmd-Opt-Q will quit the app cleanly. When Resume is disabled, however, the two shortcuts are reversed. This means that I can disable Resume by default, but if I ever want to save the application’s state, I can quit using Cmd-Opt-Q. I could see being this very handy for those marathon Wikipedia sessions where I look up after five hours and realize that a) I have four hundred tabs open to Wikipedia articles in Safari; and b) OS X would like to patch itself. With Resume, I can just Cmd-Opt-Q quit Safari, patch OS X, reboot, and reopen Safari to continue “learning”.

Of course, System Resume is pretty much the same thing but on a grander scale. When you log off or shut down / restart, you’re asked whether or not you want to resume your apps when you reboot. What I haven’t found is a way to default that little check box to disabled (to not save state), which seems to frustrate one of my coworkers a bit. I haven’t decided if I mind yet, having only rebooted a total of one time after the upgrade.

Auto Save and Versions

This early in the game I really do not have that much to say about these two features. I was actually afraid that Apple had taken the ability away to arbitrarily save in apps that support Auto Save, but I realize now that that is not the case. What I find interesting is that (at least in TextEdit) the Lock, Duplicate, and Browse All Versions commands are nowhere in any menu: you have to click on the title of the document in the actual window to get to those features. How very un-Mac-like. I was also apprehensive about what the auto-save / versioning thing would do to the size of files, but (having read nothing yet about how these two features work) it looks like version data is stored somewhere outside the document. (What I was really apprehensive about was what a plaintext document created in TextEdit would look like with the command-line utility cat(1). It looks fine.) One thing that does bother me is that when I quit TextEdit, it does not ask me whether I want to save my changes, it just does it. Many times I’ll modify a document knowing full well that I don’t want to keep the changes. Perhaps I just need to build a string out of text already in the document. (Yes, this is probably a “dangerous” practice, but I’ve done it since something like 1990 without any major repercussions.) With Auto Save, it seems like I’ll be forced to change the way I work. I don’t view this as a plus. I do not like it when my tools force me to work a different way.

Summary

I’ve now had Lion installed for three days. My world has neither stopped nor really sped into the future with this latest release from Apple. I have identified a few things in Lion that I do not care for at all, yet have also stumbled upon a few other things that may make using a computer just a little nicer. At the end of the day, I have to remind myself that…well, that I probably need to get out more. :-) It’s been kind of fun writing these posts up. Hopefully they will prove useful to someone other than me.

Mac OS X Lion: My Take, Part III - Finder, Spelling, Miscellaneous Preferences

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:04:00 -0400

Part three of my initial impressions of Lion covers Finder, the new spelling auto-correct feature, and some miscellaneous settings. Make sure to read parts one, two, and four of this series as well!

Finder

I haven’t found many changes in Finder, so I don’t have too many things to say about it (yet?).

The Negative

For some reason, the upgrade unset my “Snap to Grid” preference on the Desktop. I just realized it apparently also reset my grid spacing. Just an annoyance, and easily fixed.
The default view when opening a new Finder window is something called “All My Files”. Really? What a useless view. It shows you six or seven files of various formats in the window, and if you scroll down there is a “More” icon. Hardly all my files. Maybe I’m now just one of the few people left in the world who actually remembers where I put my files for whom this new view is worthless, but I doubt it. Besides, what was wrong with Spotlight? Or search? Whatever. At least you can change the default back to opening your home folder–or any other folder for that matter.
The status bar at the bottom of Finder windows is not shown by default. I can only think that perhaps Apple took a page out of Microsoft’s book by hiding this by default. Again, whatever–it’s easy to un-hide it.

The Positive

You can change the default search behavior from “search my entire friggin' Mac” to “just search the folder I’m in and its subfolders”. Somehow I missed that in previous iterations of OS X. That would have been a handy option to change.

Spelling Auto-Correction

If I had left auto-correct enabled, it probably would have been the death of me–or at least a contributing factor. If you’ve ever used an iDevice, it’s the same sort of cutesy little pop-up window-thing as in iOS. And for iPhones and iPads it seems to work well enough, because typically most people could probably race a snail trying to type out a sentence on an iDevice…and lose. But it does give the user time to realize that the auto-correct box has popped up.

Contrast this with a real computer. I’m not a super-fast typist or anything, but I can probably roll at about 70-80 words per minute when I get going. On the downside, I do make a decent amount of mistakes while typing. The “problem” is that when I’m typing and make a mistake or misspell something, I don’t wait before hitting the space bar to see if Lion would like to suggest an alternate spelling. No, I just cruise right along like I’ve done since that typing class I took in the 7th grade, and therein lies the problem: instead of only marking words as misspelled, by default Lion will just auto-correct the word for you (because you did after all press that convenient space bar to accept whatever inane word Lion suggested).

The example I wrote down for reference was a reply to an email I was trying to type dealing with the website www.vascan.org. Got help me, but I almost punched my iMac trying to get that thing written. Every time I tried to type “vascan.org”, as soon as I hit the period separating the domain from the TLD, Lion would helpfully change it to “va scan.org” (adding a space between “va” and “scan”). That is not useful, it’s detrimental.

Fortunately disabling auto-correct is as easy as opening System Preferences, clicking on the “Language & Text” icon, choosing the “Text” tab, and unchecking the box next to “correct spelling automatically”. Pro-tip: be sure you close and reopen whatever applications you have open in order for the autocorrect changes to take effect. I had issues with this and restarting the application seemed to help.

Miscellaneous Preferences

The new “natural” scroll direction is anything but natural. Let me explain this one. If you haven’t read about it, Lion reverses the direction you’ve been scrolling on a PC since 1993. When I use a scroll wheel–or the two-finger swipe on a trackpad–my brain has been conditioned to believe that I am manipulating the scroll bar, not the window contents. When I’m reading a web page and I get to the bottom of the window, I know I need to move the scroll bar towards the bottom to view the rest of the page. Contrast this to how a tablet works: when I am reading a web page in Safari on my iPad, it’s supposed to feel like I’m reading a book or real page, and thus I put my finger on the screen and “push” the document in the direction I want it to go, just like I would a piece of paper on my desk. This is not how I interact with my iMac, or any other real computer. Fortunately this is easy to disable by unchecking the “Scroll direction: natural” on the “Scroll & Zoom” tab of the Trackpad preference pane. (I believe it’s the same for mice, except under the Mouse preference pane. I don’t have a mouse connected to my laptop to verify this, though.) This even affects scrolling left and right, such as going backwards or forwards through browser history. When I want to go “back,” I swipe to the left because that’s the direction “back” has always been. Apparently Apple would like you to believe that “back” is now somewhere off to the right side of your Mac.
The new mouse and trackpad gestures seem mostly useful, but are almost overdone. You owe it to yourself to take at least a cursory look at all the gestures under the Mouse and/or Trackpad preference panes, so that when you accidentally trigger something, you’ll have a good idea what just happened. Also, the gestures feel weird on a Magic Mouse, but I blame that on the hardware and not the software. For a company that used to specialize in human interface design, their peripherals sure do destroy my wrists and hands after eight hours of non-stop use.
Speaking of gestures, the new “Smart Zoom” gesture is magnificent. One of my complaints lately is that the size of text on the screen seems to go down as pixel density goes up. You’d think OS developers would be able to compensate for this automatically and make rendered text more pixel-dense but still be the same height as before, instead of making users jack up their font sizes to compensate. Anyway, the point here is that two-finger double-tapping will zoom a window to where it thinks the content is, just like on an iDevice. It makes reading web pages with tiny fonts so much easier.
There is an “Advanced Options” pane by right-clicking on a user in the “Users & Groups” preference pane. From here you can change the user’s uidNumber, gidNumber, loginShell, and various other things. I haven’t verified whether this existed before or not, and it wouldn’t be useful 99% of the time, but for that 1% of the time where you really have to change your uidNumber, you can do it from here.
The “About This Mac” / “More Info…” button opens a pared-down version of the System Information application. It shows the following tabs: Overview, Displays, Storage, and Memory. The Memory tab will even tell you how many slots you have, which ones are filled, and has a link at the bottom for “Memory Upgrade Instructions” that takes you to an Apple KB article on upgrading memory for whichever type of Mac you’re using. That’s kind of nice. And of course you can still get to the full System Information application as well.
LaunchPad doesn’t need to exist. Another one of those “Top New Features” with Lion, you can read about it here. I have no idea why the Dock, Spotlight, and the friggin' Applications folder weren’t good enough for finding and displaying applications. I will not acknowledge its presence any further than to say that my MBP and iMac are not iPads!
Suspending my MacBook Pro with a full-screen application in the foreground will not resume to the full-screened app. This is something I’ve noticed while typing up these notes. I’m using Safari in full-screen mode, which I guess means that it gets its own desktop(-ish). Anyway, when I close the lid of the MacBook Pro to read over my notes, then open it back up, it always wants to switch away from Safari to another application on the original desktop Safari was on before I full-screened it. It’s a little annoying–probably a bug–but nothing I can’t cope with.
Scroll bars are hidden most of the time. To tell the truth, I haven’t noticed the scroll bars being absent that much. I purposely left the setting at the default to see how much I actually look at them for feedback. It turns out I use the scroll bars for two very important things. First, it gives me feedback on document length. Second, it shows me exactly how far I’ve gotten in that document, and how much farther I have to go to hit the end. So far it hasn’t been a big deal to have them only show up when I scroll, but I confess I did re-enable them on the iMac at work.
What’s the point of rubber-band scrolling? It’s cute on an iDevice, but it’s distracting on a real computer and slows down real work.
I would like for Apple to show me that DFS support actually exists in Finder. This feature excited me when I first read about it. Apple says, “Lion supports DFS URLs, drill-down, failover, and reconnects when connecting to Windows file servers.” Sweet! So I click on the desktop, Cmd-K to connect to a server, type cifs://server/dfsshare, wait for a while, get a list of top-level folders. Awesome! Wait…we use access-based enumeration, so I really shouldn’t see all these folders. Oh well, I guess that still doesn’t work. Click on my department’s top-level share, and get…nothing. An empty folder, a.k.a. the DFS root folder that should have triggered a DFS referral. #@$&%!

Summary

It may seem like I have a lot of negative things to say about Lion–and guess I do–but by and large I haven’t found too many things that I cannot disable, reset, or otherwise ignore to make the Lion experience a useful one. Coming up tomorrow I plan to finish this series with a post about changes to a couple of miscellaneous applications and weigh in with my thoughts on Auto Save and App/System Resume.

Mac OS X Lion: My Take, Part II - Mail, iCal, and Address Book

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 15:40:00 -0400

Next up in my mini-series detailing my initial impressions with Lion is the PIM suite: Mail, iCal, and Address Book. (Be sure to read parts I, III, and IV of the series.) I won’t say I’m a heavy email or calendar user (I’m not a manager or anything… ;-)), but I am an email admin, and a persnickety one at that. I expect my mail and calendaring applications to behave in a certain way, and when they don’t, my feathers get ruffled and I get annoyed. Continue reading for a (probably too lengthy) list of pros and cons about Lion’s PIM suite.

Mail

I should start by saying that we use Exchange at the university as our central email system, so my account in Mail is an Exchange 2010 mailbox (as are my iCal and Address Book accounts). However, I think most of the following points would apply to any account type.

After opening Mail for the first time in Lion, my initial reaction was something like, “holy crap, what did they do?” Apple’s changes to the Mail application are so extensive that it’s one of the “Top New Features” of the OS. Ever used Mail on an iDevice? Yep, that’s pretty much what your initial view is. The layout works on a tablet or small device, but I think it’s terrible on a full-fledged computer. So, step one of my “Mail remediation program” was to show my folder structure on the left-hand side again, and step two was to find the “use classic layout” option in Preferences to put the message list back on top of the preview pane–you know, where it should be. (Apple, you do not have to follow Microsoft Outlook on this stupid side-by-side view. It’s cluttered. It is in Outlook, and it is with Mail, too.) I think I also turned off the conversation view on my Inbox, but that’s neither here nor there, really. I leave conversation view disabled on the Inbox, but enable it for folders of listserv mail.

On to the pros and cons.

The Negative

The application still doesn’t retrieve the user’s server-side rules from an Exchange 2007 / 2010 server. I know EWS exposes this. I was actually surprised this functionality wasn’t included. Guess I’ll have to continue to use Outlook or OWA to manage my inbox rules.
Initially, header details in the preview pane are limited to From, Subject, and Date. No “To:” line. “CC:” isn’t there either. That’s just way too limited for me. Fortunately it’s as simple as clicking “Details” on the right-hand side of the preview pane to get a more useful view, and thank heavens that preference is sticky between messages.
Viewing “Raw Source” of a message opens up a new window instead of changing the view in the preview pane. Okay, this is probably personal preference and me being way too nit-picky, but I liked how Mail used to just change the view in the preview pane. I think it was cleaner than having to deal with a pop-up window.
Replying or forwarding a message makes the preview pane “hop out” into a new window. What is this I don’t even… It makes the app feel childish. Apple should have resisted the urge to animate every little thing about Lion.
The Send button is now just an icon of a paper airplane. Because clearly, that’s the sort of icon you’d think to click to send an email. (Yes, that stupid icon was in previous versions of Mail, and I tolerated it then only because the word “Send” was right below it.) Again, this is a personal thing. Using a paper airplane for an icon neither enhances nor degrades the functionality of the application. But it also makes no sense.
The folder list font is bigger, so fewer folders fit in the view. Another personal preference. I expect this is actually a positive for many people. Honestly, I debated whether to put this in the list of positives or negatives, and only decided to put it here because I lost a coin-toss with myself.
Viewing PDFs with Quick Look seems to want to “snap” to pages instead of the previous “continuous page flow” view. By this I mean that you can’t make Quick Look span the bottom-half of one page and the top-half of the next page. If you scroll down it will just snap the view to the next page instead. This is just downright annoying. I haven’t tried it with other documents to see if it behaves the same way. I know Quick Look is pervasive throughout OS X, but I have no clue where I would look for configuration options.
The keyboard shortcut for the Activity Viewer window was changed from Cmd-0 to Cmd-Option-0. Apple is taking a page out of Microsoft’s book here, by invalidating muscle memory and making me wonder if I’ve gone mad. The weird thing is that Cmd-0 (that’s a zero, by the way) is actually bound to another command (“Message Viewer”) that resides under the same Window menu , which will really mess with your head. “Why isn’t the Activity Viewer showing? I typed the shortcut! I even saw the Window menu light up, so I know the key combo registered!” Sigh.
Mail in Lion seems to be worse at discovering conversations than in Snow Leopard. I subscribe to a few listservs, and I like to enable conversation view in those folders. In Snow Leopard, Mail was very good about figuring out which emails went with which thread. In Lion, however, I have one listserv that Mail just cannot figure out how to thread at all. It shows a few of the emails in threads, but by and large most emails in that folder are now unthreaded. This seems like a genuine regression to me.

The Positive

You can set a custom header detail view and include headers relevant to you. Part of spelunking through a new release like this is finding things you never knew existed (or saw but quickly forgot because you weren’t actively looking for that particular feature). I have no idea if this was an option previously, but it’s there in Lion. Cool.
There is a “Get Account Info” option that shows folder size, Out-Of-Office settings, and some other summary data. Again, I don’t know if this was present in previous versions, but I think it’s pretty neat. I’m fairly certain the OOF section didn’t exist prior to Lion, even if the others did. What surprised me was that it pulled my OOF settings from the Exchange server, so Apple didn’t just create a one-off client-side autoresponder setting. Of course, having this makes the absence of server-side rules in Mail completely baffling.
When in conversation view, clicking on the rolled-up conversation will show you a linear view of all messages in that thread in the preview pane. Previously it would just show you a list of all messages in the thread: who sent them, when they were sent, and the subject line.

iCal

I use iCal to view my Exchange 2010 calendar as well as my personal Google calendar. I also typically have a couple of Exchange delegate calendars listed as well. I’m not really a heavy calendar user at all.

The Negative

The new interface looks like a desk calendar. I guess it looks okay, but it seems less professional somehow.
The list of calendars is now hidden behind a “Calendars” button. I really liked seeing at a glance which calendars were shown. This isn’t terrible in and of itself, but without the calendar list you have no legend to remind you of which appointment color goes with which calendar. Is red my Exchange calendar or my personal calendar? Which calendar is this green appointment on? (Of course, the subject of the appointment typically helps with that, but it’s still slightly confusing; especially if I have my coworkers' calendars listed as delegate calendars, since we all go to a lot–but not all–of the same meetings.)

The Positive

Theoretically it supports Exchange 2010. Of course, you can still typically use Exchange 2007 EWS calls against an Exchange 2010 client access server, which was how iCal in Snow Leopard was working with my calendar before now. Of course, iCal seemed to crash about once every half hour before, too, leading me to my next point…
At least it hasn’t crashed yet. It was getting comical just how often iCal crashed on Snow Leopard on my iMac at work. The day before I upgraded to Lion was the worst it had ever been. I got into a fight with it: I’d start it, it’d immediately crash, I’d click “Reopen”, it’d crash, I’d click “Reopen”, it’d crash again, I’d click “OK” and open it from the Dock, it’d crash…I wish I was making that up.

Otherwise, I can’t find much that has really changed. It looks like iCal on iOS. Whoop-dee-do.

Address Book

Upon starting Address Book for the first time, I had the same initial reaction to it as I did to Mail: “oh no, what did they DO?”

The Negative

It looks like a book. What was wrong with the old interface? Is there a particular reason that Apple decided to turn it into something I’d expect from Fisher Price? Come on, guys, people do use Macs in the corporate world, and that…thing…is just a joke. It’s awful. The old user interface was functional and didn’t look bad, dated, or otherwise in need of improvement. Ugh.

The Positive

At least it’s still there. Honestly, that’s about all I can think of.

“Mail, Contacts, & Calendars” Preference Pane

This is an interesting enhancement. Instead of managing your various accounts in Mail, iCal, and Address Book, you can now manage them from a central preference pane. It also seems to handle instant messaging accounts that iChat understands. They lifted this straight from iOS, and I will say that it seems like it might be handy.

Summary

I really should have kept one of my Macs on Snow Leopard so that I could do comparisons to check whether what I thought was a new feature in Lion didn’t already exist in Snow Leopard.

Mail, iCal, and Address Book are still as functional as their predecessors, and some of the changes Apple made are welcome. By and large, most changes seem to be to the user interface, and mostly make the applications look like something you’d see on a Hasbro “My First Computer” toy. I’m a professional: please give me professional-looking applications.

Stay tuned for part III of this little series. If you missed part I, you can view it here.

Mac OS X Lion: My Take, Part I - Mission Control

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 23:22:00 -0400

Everyone is going to have their own opinion of Apple’s new operating system, Lion (10.7 for those of you keeping count). I upgraded both my personal MacBook Pro and the work iMac yesterday during lunch, and before I went home I had three full pages of hand-written notes–both good and bad–detailing my initial impression with the new OS. At this point I’ve only used Lion for a day-and-a-half; in all probability I’ll find other depressing quirks and unexpected niceties that could be added to these notes.

In typing up my list I realized it would work better as a multi-part series instead of one long description of everything I noted. This first part will deal with Mission Control. (Parts II, III, and IV follow this.)

Mission Control (née Spaces)

Spaces is gone, and in its place is the new “Mission Control”. Apple has this to say about it:

Mission Control brings together Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, and full-screen apps to give you one place to see and navigate everything running on your Mac.

Sure, whatever. I like this guy’s description better:

Mission Control suggests to me that Spaces and Exposé had a child and found out that they were cousins when it was already too late to terminate the poor, unfortunate bastard.

I’m going to assume you’ve worked with Spaces before and have at least read about Mission Control’s new features, and as such and not going to reproduce them here. With that said, let’s jump in.

The Negative

There is no way to tell which desktop you’re on. With Spaces, I could always look on the menu bar at the Spaces icon and see the number of the Space I was currently on. This is turning out to be less of an issue than I originally thought, though, since I have very specific app pinnings (more on that in a bit). It’d still be nice to know at a glance where I was in the desktop list–and no, opening Mission Control is not “at a glance”.
Spaces used to have an overview that showed all of the Spaces and what was on them. Yes, you can view all your desktops in Mission Control, but they’re tiny compared to the Spaces preview. I didn’t use this feature often, but I think it was more useful when I needed it than Mission Control is going to be. At least you can still drag applications between desktops in Mission Control, as well as use the “left-click window, Cmd-NumKey” dance to move windows between desktops without invoking Mission Control. (Geez, could they have thought of a longer name? I’m already tired of typing it out.)
Desktops move around in the desktop list by default. I don’t know the full ramifications of this since I disabled it almost immediately after realizing what it was doing, but instead of keeping all desktops in a line by desktop number, the desktops seem to behave more like the application MRU list (alt-tab). I assume that using number keys will still take you directly to a specific desktop, but it seems like this “feature” would play havoc if you’re used to using arrow keys to cycle through desktops. I really don’t want to have to guess at where my desktops will be in the desktop list at any given time, thankyouverymuch. Disabled. Speaking of arrow keys…
Using the arrow keys to navigate between desktops is sloooow. Apple CoreAnimate’d the tar out of the desktop-to-desktop transition, and while it is nice and pretty, it probably takes a full second or more between the time that you switch from the first desktop until you can do anything on the second desktop. (Oddly, using the number keys to move between desktops is still very quick.) I know what you’re thinking: “a full second? My, however will you cope?!?” Yeah, well, when you flip back-and-forth between desktops as often as I do, it gets very annoying to have to wait. Of course, maybe it doesn’t matter anymore because…
You can no longer organize desktops into rows and columns. With Mission Control, you get one long row of desktops, which I guess looks nice up there at the top of the Mission Control window, but if that was the only reason for getting rid of the ability to organize desktops into a grid, those Apple devs should have thought a bit longer. Here’s the scenario: with Snow Leopard I had six Spaces organized in two rows of three Spaces each. The top row–spaces one through three–consisted of (1) Safari; (2) Mail/Outlook, iCal, Address Book; and (3) VMware with Windows 7 desktop. The bottom row–spaces four through six–were (4) IM/Twitter; and Spaces 5 and 6 were “scratch” spaces, typically used for Terminal windows and Word documents and other applications I didn’t care about pinning to a specific desktop. A nice thing about upgrading instead of reinstalling from scratch was that the number of desktops and all my app “pinnings” were preserved, so Adium is still on desktop 4, for instance. However, now I either have to arrow left and right (and endure the delay) to move through all six desktops or use the number keys to bounce directly to a desktop. Unfortunately, since desktop four is no longer logically “under” desktop one, to get there from desktop one it’s either three arrow-lefts or involves taking my eyes off the screen to hunt down the “4” key. With Spaces, that would have been an “arrow-down”–much easier! Adium was “below” Safari, VMware was to the right of Mail and “above” a scratch space, etc. It made sense.
Lastly, desktop movement is not circular. You cannot arrow-left on the first desktop to get to the last desktop or vice-versa. I have no idea why that got removed.

The Positive

At least you can still have multiple desktops. Snarky, yes, but sadly it’s almost all I could come up with.
Performing an upgrade from Snow Leopard preserved my desktops and application desktop assignments. At least I didn’t have to go through and reset assignments for all of my frequently used applications. For what it’s worth, the way to assign an application to a specific desktop is to right-click the application’s icon in the Dock, then choose Options–>Assign To.

Summary

Mission Control is nice, I guess, but in creating this new hybrid Spaces/Exposé thing they removed functionality that I’ve come to rely on (and indeed, has probably been in UNIX-like windows managers for 15 years or more). In short, I want Spaces back.