Up is Down, and Down is Up

At school, my aging MacBook laptop has been replaced with a new Mac Mini. I also now made a transition from Snow Leopard to Lion. I have had to tweak the interface to make it more usable. I vastly prefer the column view for navigating Finder windows, so setting that to default is not a big deal.

I have also had to install all of my software including a new copy of CS5.5. Yay! I finally have a machine that can handle Photoshop and InDesign. Dropbox, 1Password, and other favorites went on early.

As with most transitions to a new computer, the speed and lack of crashing makes up for any learning curve with the new OS and with the time it takes to install all the software that makes it one’s own. Some of that time is even reduced with most of my work material living on the server or in the cloud.

One feature of Lion, however, has my brain working overtime. Lion reverses scroll direction, and it would be easy to go into system preferences to change it back to what I have learned since the advent of mice. However, the change was made with reason; Mac (and Windows) OS is migrating toward touch control in which the scroll direction makes sense. I have ordered a magic trackpad to help me make this transition away from mousing, but in the mean time, I will make my brain just adjust. It reminds me of an experiment I read about in Intro Psych in which the test subject wore glasses that inverted sight both vertically and horizontally to project an “upright” image on the retina. I imagine that the upside down glasses would be a similar experience.

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