Roar went the Lion

Its no secret, I work on a Mac these days. Pshaw, you say, but its nice to have working eye candy (without problematic compiles) and still be able to drop to a *NIX shell that speaks my language at the drop of a hat. Well, last night I made an app store purchase, upgrading to Lion in a pretty straight forward (albeit “is this going to work??”) step.

I’m not savvy enough to identify all of the changes, but the ones I can point to have been pretty nice. Spaces got some redesign, adding a couple of simple gesture commands for moving around that makes them more natural. As near as I can tell, all of the bundled apps got a facelift and update – iChat is definitely tweaked, and the mail app has finally caught up with the times. The face lift for iCal is pleasant, though the real gem there is the integration with the cloud – which is now also integrated with iOS, meaning (FINALLY!) you can sync reminders between your iPhone and desktop without paying for special apps and running funky connectors. That one is a major “about time,” btw.

I’ve always like the integration between iChat and the Mail app, which has me (again) giving the native suite a shot – I’m trying a week of running all Apple published tools (Mail – iChat – Safari – iCal), which if you’re using all four meld together to form a cohesive unit. Chances are good I will switch back to my standard Sparrow and rockmelt/chrome trade off, but for now its interesting to see everything work together under the hood.

In other roaring events, I’m within 700 words of hitting my 60k mark.

The story isn’t over. There’s a good 10-15k left to write in the first draft, the big problem being at this point I have a good, solid notion of the conclusion, and I know where I’ve been, I just need to figure out how to thread the gap. I have some ideas, and this is after all just the first draft.

And that’s about it. We’ll see if I can finish that initial 60k tomorrow – we have a Girl Scout/face painting/pumpkin event midday that should provide a great outing for the kids, but a real kink in the guaranteed writing time. I’ll let you all know how it goes!