Change To Lion? Don’t Upgrade Just Yet
By now you’ve heard of upgrading to the new OS. It’s
been out for a while — since about July 2011. I’m a true
believer in upgrading to the latest and greatest when
appropriate. But if taking the next major version means
taking the next step forward and falling down a cliff,
no thanks. What do I mean by this? There are a ton of
mac apps out there. Over time you find which ones
you like, which ones you have to use in your business or
everyday work, and which ones are cannot-live-without utilities.
Let’s say you have ten favorites. You’re currently on
Mac OS X v10.6.8, the stepping stone OS prior to going to Lion.
So why not just upgrade? What if 3 out the 10 of your must-have
apps are not compatible in Lion, then what? You will be
SOL – out of luck. Don’t upgrade — just yet.
My orginal thought was to upgrade to Lion, migrate all my apps
over then go from there, not really paying attention to what
current apps will work or not. Wrong! Not a good idea.
Here are some samples of apps or websites that users
reported problems with using them in Lion:
Textwrangler
Textmate
Comcast Homepage
Dragon Dictate
Norton Antivirus
VM Fusion v3 — must upgrade to v4
Adobe Illustrator CS2, CS3, CS5
Adobe InDesign CS, CS2
Adobe InDesign SDK CS4
Adobe InDesign CS5.5
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4
Adobe Photoshop Extended CS5
Facebook Desktop Notifications by Facebook
Aperture by Apple
Final Cut Studio by Apple
TweetDeck by Twitter
Tux Guitar
Handbrake
GIMP 2.6.11 by lisanet
OpenOffice.org
RoboForm by Siber Systems
Rosetta Stone v4 (v3 works)
Snapfish Fotolibro (Photobook)
Sony Hi-MD Music Transfer
Tex-Edit Plus
Time Machine by Apple
Opera
Games:
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos / Frozen Throne
The Sims Complete
The Sims 3
Torchlight
Portal by Valve (Portal 2 works)
Spider-Man 2: The Game by The Fizz Factor
Some apps just don’t work. And others have a few problems. If you feel the
same way I do, you don’t want your app to work at 97%, you want all of it!
This list is not meant to be all-inclusive. It’s just a sample that I pulled
from a compatibility list. If you wonder about a particular app you can see
the complete list at:
http://roaringapps.com/apps:table/tags/_a/index_tags/_a
This is not say that these apps will forever be broken in Lion. It just means
that the vendor will need some time to upgrade their product to work on Lion.
The list also tells you which apps haven’t been tested yet. If you run across
one of these and you know it doesn’t work, you can update the list for other users.
I don’t have any statistics to back up my conclusion, but it doesn’t seem
like there is a mass rush to upgrade to Lion mainly because of the risk that
some app you currently use may not work after you upgrade. This problem is not
only with Apple’s OS, windows users suffer from the same consequences. If you
note in my partial list, even some of Apple’s own products have problems in
Lion. I’m sure they have or will have newer versions that will work, but
that’s another app you have to upgrade in your list.
If you are starting fresh with Lion and are using only Lion compatible
apps then you wouldn’t have any issues. But I do need to mention that there
are some compelling reasons to upgrade to Lion now. If you want to use
iCloud which is MobileMe’s replacement, Apple recommends you upgrade all
your devices to iOS5 and Lion as appropriate. iCloud is simply an Apple
repository in the internet intended for all Apple device data.
You can store photos, videos, contacts, documents, etc. You can sync, backup
and restore from iCloud. iCloud is a great idea and Apple has already
set the infrastructure in place. But until the apps that I need are fully
Lion-compatible, I probably would not make the full step over to Lion just yet.
As for backups, I’ll rely on good old Time Machine. Maybe this would explain
why Time Machine is having issues in Lion — it would be (should be) obsoleted
with iCloud in place.
One last note. It is possible to work on multiple OSes even if we’re talking
about the same OS. For e.g. I’ve been toying with the idea of using an
external drive and installing Lion on it. And, I would leave my current
version of Snow Leopard on my harddisk as is. This way I could boot from the
Lion drive and test for myself which apps work or do not work with Lion
when needed. In addition, I can keep up with the newer OS and have use of iCloud
too. When I needed to do serious work, I would just boot up in Snow Leopard.
Eventually, when the apps I need had a chance to catch up with Lion, I can make my full step over to it then. Whether you upgrade or not, of course, is up to you. But before you do, find out which of your apps have issues or not on Lion and save yourself some grief.