I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro from Snow Leopard to Lion as well as a Mac Mini which I did using Apple Remote Desktop ($80 well spent in my mind but that is another story). The upgrades on both went quite smoothly and I am pleasantly impressed with the new look and feel as well as how the tools I use once more ‘just worked’. There were a few tools I upgraded but not much. I had to upgrade the following tools:
- Tunnelblick to access my VPN, I had to go searching for the upgrade
- Oxygen Cloud, received an email about the upgrade, but the tool itself did not auto-upgrade
- Codeweavers Crossover Office, received an email about this upgrade
- Little Snitch, I did not receive an email nor did I notice it was not running, but once it started it said it needed to download a new version.
- Livescribe Desktop, just required me to start the application and the download was ready. Which required an Adobe AIR update.
- Flipshare, just required me to plugin my Flip and all was upgraded.
- IOmega Storage Manager for my IX2, I had to check for the upgrade
- Apple Remote Desktop, required an update that showed up in the AppStore
Given the upgrade just occurred, this is pretty good, all but one of my tools that required an upgrade actually emailed me that there was an upgrade available. I find that very helpful. However, the fact that Little Snitch, which is very useful security software did not start to tell me there was a download, I find to be a particular failure. Granted, I did notice it was not available and manually restarted the program.
The other tools I use, just worked, as expected.
- Growl
- Fusion
- RDC
- SnagIt
- Camtasia
- arSync
- Skype
- Trillian
There is also an update to MacOS X Lion’s version of CUPS so that printing works properly for my Epson R1800 shared printer as documented in the article MacBook Pro: Update on Integration: Printing.
So far it has been a relatively painless upgrade with great new features such as the launchpad. While I personally cannot make use of the gesture computing mechanisms everyday, they are very cool to use. I just wish they had more pictures of Lions for the background. The Snow Leopard pictures were pretty amazing.
As for the Mac Mini, I did that upgrade using Apple Remote Desktop and that also while slower due to lack of SSD, also upgraded without a hitch even over quite a distance. Download, upgrade, reboot, reconnect, viola, successful remote upgrade of a Mac Mini.
Hurray for Apple, the upgrade Just Works.
