Admittedly I've taken a very slow approach to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. This is probably the longest it's taken me to fully adopt any Mac OS in history. I cautiously installed it on two of my Macs. I installed it on my personal MacBook Air (2010 model) and my iTunes iMac Media Server. These are probably my two least mission critical Macs. The main reason for my hesitation is because everything I do works perfectly in 10.6.7 (I've had a few issues with 10.6.8). The second reason is that I haven't seen anything in Lion feature-wise that would make me want to take the plunge and deal with potential problems on my work/production Macs. Sure there are a few nice enhancements like the new Mail interface, being able to resize a window from any side (about time), AirDrop, and some of the new gestures are cool. However, none of those features are must haves for me. Also with each cool new thing I could name I could also name a change in the New OS that annoys me. I have no doubt that over time I'll eventually migrate the majority of my Macs over to Lion, but for now I have no immediate plans to do so.
Taking Lion on the Road at the Last Minute!
Last week I headed to Adobe Photoshop World in Vegas. This was also after coming off a 6 week sabbatical. It was my first week back to work. Knowing that we were going to be announcing Adobe Carousel at this show I decided to get my Mac, iPhone and iPad ready to show this new product/service. Little did I realize at the time that the Mac client required Lion! I now had a decision to make. My choices were to install Lion on my work MacBook Pro, Take my MacBook Air (which I had never demo'd on before) or simply not be prepared to show Carousel. I figured the easiest option would be to get the MacBook Air (MBA) ready for not only my Carousel demo, but the rest of the demos and classes I was teaching. I checked first to make sure that my MBA could boot off the same OS that my MacBook Pro (MBP) was running. Luckily it could boot off 10.6.4 or higher. Next I used SuperDuper! to clone my MBP's (10.6.7) drive onto the portable external drive I travel with. This way, worse case scenario I'd be able to boot off that drive if I forgot to set something up on the Lion drive. I copied my demo files onto the MBA's hard drive in a new Demo User Account that I setup and I headed out the door.
Each night before the next day of classes I tested everything that I planned to show in class to make sure it worked and it did. I never had to boot off my external. I'm glad I brought it though because there were a few things that I had forgotten to copy off of it. Everything worked fine in Lion. No problems with Photoshop CS5, InDesign CS 5.5, Illustrator CS5, Lightroom 3.5 RC & of course Adobe Carousel.
What annoyed me most
There were three things in Lion that I had to change. Although I really don't have a problem with the "natural scrolling", I end up turning it off because I spend more time on Snow Leopard than I do on Lion. Going back and forth between the two operating systems is a lot easier when they both scroll the same way.
The second thing that annoyed me was that every time I'd launch an App it would also re-open the last document I was working on. While that may be a feature for most, it was a problem for me. If I want the document I was working on to be opened, I know how to find it and open it.
Lastly I really don't like the Lion feature that shows all your recent files (All My Files) in the Finder sidebar. Luckily you can Command-Drag to drag it off the bar (or right click on it to remove it).
The forth thing that annoyed me that i don't seem to know how to restore or if it's even possible is that in Lion it doesn't show you the number of files or how much available space you have at the bottom of the Finder window! Why would they take this away?
UPDATE: This problem is also solved by choosing View-Show Status Bar (Thanks Brad!)
One thing I forgot to bring. I'm so used to being on WiFi or having Ethernet built-in that it wasn't until Friday when I had a presentation in the Adobe booth and I needed to connect to the ethernet network at the demo station. That's when I realized that I didn't bring my USB-to-Ethernet adapter. We worked around it by setting up another MacBook Pro and using Internet Sharing over WiFi. Lesson learned! I'll make sure I always have this little adapter.
The Bottom Line
Once I tweaked a few preferences in Lion I had no problem using it the entire week. Also battery life seemed noticeably better on the plane rides. I landed in Vegas with a 54% charge! While everything worked fine, I still didn't see any real advantages either. It felt like I was losing more than I was gaining. For that reason I'll take my time going to Lion. What I did learn from this past week is that my MacBook Air is going to be going on more trips with me even if I need to demo as long as I'm not going to be demoing a ton of Creative Suite apps simultaneously (since it only has 4GB of RAM). I'm also now drooling more than ever over the 2011 model with the Core i7 processor. If it had more than 4GB of RAM I'd upgrade in a heartbeat.
It is not uncommon these days for people to have two or more Macs. The most common scenario is a desktop Mac and a portable Mac. Perhaps it's a Mac at work and a Mac at home. Up until recently my situation was a little different. I've had several Macs over the years and have usually had two or more Macs in my home, but in my case the Macs were used for specific purposes. My "main" Mac is a MacBook Pro and has been since the MacBook Pro was introduced. I have a Mac Mini that is my OS X Server. I have a dedicated iMac as an iTunes/media server. I have a Mac Pro that is my video editing Mac. In the past I used my "main" Mac as "my computer" and the others were used for doing certain projects or jobs. So I never really had email setup on my Mac Pro. Nor did I use the iMac for word processing or spreadsheet work, etc. I also really didn't use it to surf the web. It (the Mac Pro) was for Video editing of large projects.
The tale of Two MacBooks
While I love the power and speed of my MacBook Pro, I've always been envious of the MacBook Air. It offered the promise of a really lightweight computer that I could use for just about everything except the heavy lifting of my day job, which is demoing high in Adobe Creative Suite products. The MacBook Air traditionally just didn't have enough memory, storage, CPU power, graphics power, etc. to be my "main" computer. Yet there are certainly times I could use this computer for day to day web, email, iTunes, blogging, and just about anything else short of a full blown Creative Suite 5 demo. Sure, the MacBook Air can run the Creative Suite 5 Apps, but it's the lack of RAM (4GB Max) that makes it challenging to have multiple large applications open at once. Also the Core 2 Duo processor is a litle under powered for this task on a regular basis. While I would love to use my iPad 2 for this "second computer", it's just not there yet in terms of the Apps I would need and if I add a physical keyboard for typing long docs/blog posts (like this one), then I might as well have an Air. Yep, I just sat there admiring the MacBook Air from a distance. Well that was up until recently.
I started justifying a MacBook Air purchase for my "personal" use. I figured that it would be great for travel when I'm just going to a meeting. It would be great around the house when I don't need the most power, but need more than what an iPad can do. It would just be great to have one. See, I just justified it to myself. That wasn't hard at all. I want one! 
The other problem and probably the thing that has kept me from doing this sooner was not wanting to have to manage files between TWO "main" computers. I didn't want to be frustrated by not having the file I needed because it was on the computer I didn't have with me. This is when I started looking at today's solutions to this problem and I realized that this is very doable now with what's out there today! Here's how I solved this problem and it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be:
Email, Calendars, Web Bookmarks, Contacts, Widgets, System Prefs, Dock icons
Of course I want access to all of my most commonly used data on either computer at any time. Luckily all of my email accounts are IMAP based (as opposed to POP3 based) and therefore email isn't an issue between my computers or mobile devices because it's in the cloud (on a server). If I read, delete or file mail on one computer it is marked read, filed or deleted off all computers/devices. For calendars, Dashboard Widgets, System Prefs, Transmit FTP favorites, System Prefs and contacts I use MobileMe to sync them between devices. It also handles Safari bookmarks, but I use Google's Chrome as my default browser. As luck would have it, Chrome supports syncing of bookmarks wirelessly and automatically between computers too. I also manage my RSS feeds with Google and therefore I can view them on any device and as I read them they are marked read on all devices.
iTunes
Music was sort of an issue since iTunes doesn't offer true "syncing" between computers. Luckily I was able to solve this with SuperSync and sync the playlists I wanted from my iMac iTunes server to both MacBooks. The only thing that I don't have in both places is iOS Apps. You have to sync them to one computer at a time and I use my MacBook Pro for this. Since iOS devices can update their Apps on the devices themselves as needed, this hasn't been a problem.
Applications
I knew that Applications wouldn't be a real issue as I would just install the ones I needed on the MacBook Air. Since most software companies allow you two installs per licence, this hasn't been a problem. It's also cool that Apps downloaded/purchased from the Mac App Store can easily be installed on both Macs directly from the Mac App Store app. Also since I don't really do a lot of App installing it was really a one time thing and I haven't looked back.
Documents & Photos
Now it's time to take a look at the biggest problem of having two or more Macs and that is "Dude, where are my documents?" Each Mac and each user account on each Mac has it's own Documents folder. Mac OS X doesn't offer a great way of syncing these folders natively. If you have a MobileMe account you can accomplish this by putting your documents on your iDisk and syncing your iDisk to your desktop. However, I've found the iDisk to be too slow for this kind of daily use. Especially if you work on large documents. My solution here is Dropbox.com. Dropbox.com gives you a FREE 2GBs of space in their cloud. When you install Dropbox on your Macs, PCs or mobile devices, you will have access to the same Dropbox folder on all of your devices. While I appreciate the 2GBs of FREE space, I went with their paid option of 100GBs. I added up close to 50GBs of documents that I would want on both MacBooks and while there is a 50GB option, I didn't want to constantly be hitting the ceiling. With 100GBs of space I have room to play. Also Dropbox does syncing over your LAN, which makes it MUCH FASTER to keep multiple "Document (Dropbox)" folders in sync. I was easily able to move documents, Lightroom catalogs and websites that I author into my Dropbox folder for access on either computer. While I don't really use iPhoto, I put my iPhoto library in my Dropbox Pictures folder and it works GREAT between the two MacBooks.
Speaking of devices, it seems that more 3rd party iOS Apps work with Dropbox these days than iDisk too. The Free Dropbox.com App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is here on the 
Lastly, what about Passwords?
While you can sync your Mac OX Keychain between Macs with MobileMe, that doesn't help you with iOS devices. My favorite solution is 1Password for not only maintaining my site passwords, but also account/financial information, software serial numbers and more. The best part is that it syncs your encrypted data file with Dropbox so that you have access to it on all your Macs as well as 1Password for iOS.
How's it working?
I've had the MacBook Air 13" for a couple of months now and it's GREAT to have my choice of either Mac to take depending on what I'm doing. I've taken it on the road a couple of times now for trips that were just meetings and it's been a dream to travel with and work on those small airline tray tables. What really makes this setup a total success is the combination of MobileMe and Dropbox.com. I would NEVER want to give up either one.
Maybe iPad 4 will be the answer to my "2nd main computer", but for now I'm a happy 2 MaBook, iPad 2 and iPhone 4 user with all my data in sync and accessible between all my devices.
Last week I took a business trip to Asia and of course I took my iPad WiFi+3G 64GB with me. Since this was a business trip and my job involves doing software demonstrations, I also took my MacBook Pro. I planed to use the iPad primarily for travel and in-flight entertainment.
Entertainment on the long flights
The week before I left on my trip I decided not to watch any of my favorite TV shows that week. Instead I wanted to save them to watch on the long haul flights. So I TiVo'd them as usual on my TiVo HD and then using Toast 10 Titanium Pro I transferred them to my iMac and then converted them from the .tivo files into .MP4 files to be loaded onto the iPad. This worked great and I had several hours of entertainment to last me all the way to Singapore. Although I had games on the iPad, I wasn't in the mood to play any. Instead I just watched TV show after TV show or slept (ok, tried to sleep). I can't really comment on battery life because I had power at my seat on each flight. So there was never a need to run on battery. Since I'm not into books I didn't download any and even if I wanted to, the iBookstore is very lacking in titles at the moment. Every book that I have searched for that I would consider buying isn't available yet. So even if I wanted an eBook I would have to do it via the Kindle App.
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