last wednesday apple released its next major OS revision in form of OSX 10.7, aka LION.

despite some very exciting new features (amongst others we really like the new gestures, resume, auto save and gestures for the full list go here) we are at the moment still in the process of thoroughly putting LION through its paces, as usual already a couple of problems have started to emerge with the following applications typically used in design environments:

ArchiCAD – Graphisoft does currently not recommend upgrading to LION, more here. btw. graphisoft AUS has finally shipped ArchiCAD15, rest assured we will be testing this as well over the coming weeks.

Vectorworks – official statement is available here… as far as we are aware there are so far not many complaints on the forums, however versions prior to 12.5 will not run in LION.

SketchUP – some problems, details here.

MS Office 2011 – unless you are using communicator and Outlook there seem no major problems, the official MS statement is available here. btw. office 2004 will not run in LION.

Adobe – quite a few problems…

to see what software will be affected by LION, you can do a quick check of all your typically used applications by going to the ‘apple menu > about this mac > more info > software > applications’ – all applications that show up with ‘Classic’ or with ‘PowerPC’ in the kind column will not run in LION.

even though it might be very tempting we can at the moment not recommend you upgrade any mission critical mac to LION just yet.

for all early adopters who simply can no longer wait however, please install LION on a separate partition (at least 15GB in size) as described in detail here, but please make a complete backup first!