I finally did it. I upgraded to Lion.

Seems a little late in coming eh?

I’ve been writing software for a long time. I know how the process goes, and well… I have enough of my own bugs in a day to deal with, I don’t need to be hampered by someone else’s. Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8) was working fine for me, and out of the gate Lion had lots problems. Things are better in Lion, with Mac OS X 10.7.3, so maybe it’s time to upgrade.

Still, I didn’t. The main reason was stability. When you’re going through a development cycle, you don’t change your tools. You do this so you don’t introduce change and risk that’s outside of your control. Wait until you ship, then you can upgrade everything. Yes it might mean you get held back for a while, but that’s how it goes. But sometimes you can violate this, and I have because daily use of Snow Leopard was getting to be a problem.

See, at my day job I have to work on a MacBook Pro that runs Lion. The requirements of that project required Lion, Xcode 4.3, iOS 5 target, and so on. So I had to be all on the latest. Very cool for what it is, but well… let’s put it this way. When you use that computer all day and are forced to scroll “the other way”, when you switch to your other computer you get all messed up. I got to a point where I stopped knowing how to scroll and which way went which way on which machine, so any scrolling was always a “ok, just flick one way and if it doesn’t work then reverse direction”. Very inefficient and annoying since you become VERY aware of how much you scroll in a day. 🙂

Plus, since I had to work in Lion all day, I got to see that, for the most part, it’s working fine and not getting in my way. So I finally opted to upgrade.

Oye… what a slow, laborious process. Started it last night after supper, still working on it this morning. But now I’m turning on the whole-disk encryption and it’s slowly chugging away at encrypting everything.

The sad part? I think my current MacBook Pro isn’t going to make the upgrade to Mountain Lion. Hopefully that “Apple Event” next week will shed some light on new hardware options. 🙂