After making sure all the backups were in place and ready to rescue me with minimum downtime if things went south I went to upgrade Snow Leopard with Lion. Time Machine and Super Duper are your friends – Super Duper allows you to create a bootable disk image so you can just boot from that in case anything goes wrong. Even if my 24 Mbps ADSL is fairly fast I did went for a walk while it was downloading so I can pretty sure say it took about 1 hour to download almost 4Gb of Lion’s upgrade.

Then the usual crystal clear upgrading progress, some new bells and whistles here and there, and after a couple of hours I was on Lion trying to get some work done. I will point out below the good and the bad things as I found then:

Good

• Full screen apps (for all native apps at least)
• Preview and Mail with an improved interface
• Go to Login Window (when you want to leave your computer unattended you can now easily lock it without any workarounds)
• Reboot and Shutdown with “reopen windows on startup” (keeps the current state of apps)

Bad

• 3 column layout for Mail.app (I have tried it for a couple of hours but I lacked productivity so I went back to classic view)
• No sidebar monthly calendar on iCal (couldn’t find a solution yet besides BusyCal.com)
• Automatic file restore on launch or history state – it means when you launch an app it will automatically open the files you were editing previouly, meaning the launch takes longer and if you were using a VPN to edit remote files where you are no longer connected some apps crash – also most of the times I want to edit different files

Annoyances

• Dropbox needed to be re-installed with a beta version otherwise I was loosing contextual menu (very helpful to “Copy Public Link”)
• Spotlight took about 2 days to re-index all my files, meaning the Mac was slower during the first hours with Lion (not a good Apple experience but I guess it won’t be as bad if you’re buying a new computer instead of upgrading)

I will be updating this post on the coming days as I have time and things come on my way.