Nic’s first days with Mac OS 10.7 prove that Vincent Vega was right -- it’s the little differences.

After all the waiting, all the speculation, and all the curiosity, there I was, finally downloading Lion. Little did I know, once I installed it, I was in for some very unexpected surprises. For days my workflow was impeded by seemingly arbitrary changes. So sure, while Lion is an update designed to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, it’ll require some serious getting used to. After a few days of learning the system, my computer was a new beast.

I’ll take you through the intricacies that make up the real changes to Apple’s operating system -- some I loved, some I hated -- and, if you haven’t downloaded it yet, I have some expert advice to ensure you’re ready for the future of operating systems.

The first thing I noticed wasn’t Mission Control. It wasn’t full-screen apps, gestures, the new version of Mail, or any of the other tent pole features Apple spent their time harping on. The first thing I noticed upon installing Lion was its squared buttons. Squared buttons, from the same company that brought you rounded buttons -- what madness was this? Design changes continued to surprise and occasionally impress me. Make no mistake about it, Lion represents as much an aesthetic change as a functionality update. Unfortunately, some of the new design aesthetics take some getting used to.

Take Dashboard, which, by default, now resides as a separate window -- a bit like how a space in Spaces would have functioned. Except now the widgets are laid over an opaque carbon fiber–looking background, which meant I could no longer use note-taking widgets to jot down a few words from a Safari window, for example. That opaque background is easy enough to turn off in System Preferences, but while I was fidgeting in there, I noticed something surprising.

The new Dashboard looks a little out of place with the Apple aesthetic.

Spaces is just plain gone now, replaced instead with three-finger swiping between full-screen apps. As someone who has used Spaces since college, I initially struggled with their absence. An underused feature by many, I believe they were underused because they were underdeveloped, with no option for custom Docks or wallpapers in new Spaces. HyperSpaces for Snow Leopard showed off Spaces’ potential, but unfortunately there’s no use living in the past -- HyperSpaces creator CocoaBots has confirmed that no amount of engineering will make it compatible in Lion. They weren’t the only developer to have qualms with Lion.

So long, HyperSpaces; we hardly knew thee.

As more devs got their hands on the Lion beta, many of them complained about the inversed scrolling, or, as it’s called in System Preferences “Scroll direction: natural.” I tried it both ways and found that “Scroll direction: natural” required me to mentally prepare myself to scroll. With one finger, sliding up the trackpad moves the cursor up, but with two fingers, sliding up the trackpad moves the page down. Eventually, it’ll be easy to get used to whichever way you choose, but one thing’s for certain: switching between a computer running Snow Leopard and one running Lion is destined to be a royal pain.

Two Easy Steps to Turn Off Two Frustrating Additions

1. Turn Off Inversed Scrolling

Lion’s new inversed scrolling is going to be a pain for many to learn. Thankfully, it’s easy as pie to turn on and off. Simply head to System Preferences, click the Trackpad button, and click the middle tab called Scroll & Zoom. The first checkbox is “Scroll direction: natural.” Uncheck the box to turn it off.

If you’re still using Snow Leopard and want to get ready for Lion’s inversed scrolling, download Scroll Reverser at bit.ly/egXTWE.

2. Turn Off “Dashboard as a Space”

A lot of people are going to use widgets again. As they’re only a quick three-finger swipe from your Desktop (or what you might start considering your Home screen), getting to them is even easier than it was as a quick tap of a Function key. However, that comes with a price -- that carbon fiber background that you can’t see through. If you’d like to turn this off, so you can see your widgets over a slightly dimmed background, head to System Preferences > Mission Control. Uncheck the “Show Dashboard as a space” box and you’ll have the good ol’ widgets back. Only problem? You can’t three-finger swipe to get to them.

There’s a world of options to be found in System Preferences. We suggest you take a look at all of them, even if you don’t plan on changing anything.