By Theo Boham-Carter

Two days ago I upgraded my iMac at home to Lion, the latest Apple operating system. I didn’t need to of course, but I’m impulsive and it was new and £20 and I got excited. I usually have a self-imposed ‘wait and see how broken Photoshop is before upgrading’ rule for things like this (it doesn’t), but I got caught up in the whirlwind of a new Apple software release. Making big decisions on the internet is far too easy.

So now, having used Lion for last couple of days, I’m not that impressed with my purchase.

I knew this would happen.

To be fair, everyone else on the internet seems to love it. And yes, Lion has probably much better security than Snow Leopard (which I was upgrading from) and there are probably all manner of incredibly clever new things happening in the background that weren’t happening before. But as I sit in front of my ‘new’ computer I neither notice nor care about the way the filesystem has been streamlined. I just care about the fact that all my icons used to be prettier than they are now.

So here then are my top two current least favourite improvements in OSX Lion.

1. Drab icons

I saw this one coming. When iTunes 10 was released (you remember, the one with the popular dock icon) they stripped the colour from the interface. The Music Library icon went from being bright blue to grey. Podcasts went from purple to grey. Movies and Books also went grey. Basically iTunes went grey. And now everything else has too.

Which would be fine if it helped me find my documents faster, but it does the complete opposite. If I’m navigating through folders I use colour as a shorthand. My peripheral vision spots an orange hard drive icon and my muscle memory starts repositioning my cursor before I’m even aware of what I’m doing. I know where I’m going without having to read the signpost. Now every icon looks the same, forcing me to read the label assigned to each one. It’s a totally backwards decision. Colour recognition works more effectively (and quickly) than reading does.

I’ll get used to it, but thats not the point. We’ve gone in the wrong direction.

2. Title bar buttons

This annoys me because it feels like a compromise. The three buttons that sit top left on all windows (close, minimise, zoom) have been made smaller by about 10%. I’m ok with this on principle, but if as a result of making things smaller it’s necessary to massively increase the contrast on the action icons themselves, then you're probably better off with what you had before.

It looked cleaner and clearer, and it had a bigger footprint meaning it was both easier to see and easier to click.

So that’s what’s really annoying me at the moment. I don’t want to overstate things, but seriously Apple, what went wrong? You know how to design interfaces.

There are other things that bother me, like the way Apple have suddenly decided that I've been mouse scrolling the wrong way for the past 20 years (I haven’t), and my Spaces now appear all in a line rather than as a grid (so it takes me longer to get to number three). Oh, and Launchpad (the thing that smears your dock contents right across your iMac screen to look like an iPad) is both utterly bizarre and staggeringly pointless.

For the most part I can ignore or override these things. But it’s out of character to see a couple of really big, really poor decisions made in the name of progress.

If it ain’t broke...