interesting feature, would be cool if next macbooks would use that patent that apple has of having music controls on the outside

Wow. We must be hard up for Lion feature information if THIS is considered newsworthy.

Hey, I've always wanted to be able to reach out and touch one of those 'flipping' album images and have the song play. Always felt it SHOULD be interactive, instead of just a tease. I'm gratified to see I'm not alone in this, at least.

I want that screen saver on Apple TV. With iPhone remote you could have the same functionality.

If they are adding features to iTunes could they finally give the ability to play the visualizer full screen on one monitor and dj from the other....I don't know how this simple feature has been yet to be implemented

Very nice. I enjoy that screen saver quite a bit and it would be fun to click on an album to play it.

Am I the only who finds this sort of thing trivial? Oh, hell, why am I mincing words...

At this point I feel sure I can live out the rest of my life without acquiring any new ways to play music, watch TV, or see movies. To me, the whole notion of new and exciting ways to consume is oxymoronic to the point of drooling idiocy. The content is for the most part such despicable trash that I regard the obsession with its delivery much as I would a lunatic wrapping excrement in gold foil.

Thus far, my reaction to Lion has ranged from a mild, shrugging, vague sort of approval through snorts of contempt. An iTunes screensaver? Does anyone really care? This is the cutting edge of virtual living? Feh.

Yo, Cupertino... How 'bout banishing the Whirling Rainbow of Despair?

I have to agree. So far all the new features of Lion seem very "fluffy". Where's the beef? Also, trying to iOS-ify it seems noble but the implementation so far seems somewhat confused. Reversing the scrolling? Risky move.

Along with Bertrand Serlet's departure, I really wonder what is going on in the OS X team. You may remember when Serlet talked at a keynote, he seemed to have a great vision for the Mac. He talked about a revolution of in just a few years having gigabytes not megabytes of RAM, powerful GPUs and CPUs, multiple-core CPUs and approaching terabytes of storage. He seemed to have a passion to really want to leverage that. Ironically in the time since he spoke of this everything went to mobile and the things people do with their computers seem more "dumb". Facebook, web, Microsoft Office. RAM, GPU, CPU, storage (16GB compared to 1TB in laptops!) reversed in direction by becoming less powerful eg. iPhone and iPad which pales in comparison to what we have today on a MacBook Pro.

Don't get me wrong, the iPhone and iPad is important and impressive by any stretch of the imagination.

But Serlet must be at some level disappointed that the Mac always catered to a more intelligent crowd that did interesting things with it. Now it is a fancy toy for many. How many really need 4GB of RAM? Sandy Bridge? What is infuriating as well to me sometimes is that these hardware advancements in the Mac are not balanced. The CPU is great but 320GB SSDs can have a big impact, they're still shipping slow-ass 5400rpm drives. There was a lot of promise of GPU computing but instead of quality GPUs we get rubbish Intel graphics. This goes to show there isn't really a consensus on what the Mac should be doing for people, instead they're riding the specifications train to sell to less and less clued-in customers.

The weirder thing is that we have cheap Windows laptops that have these hardware advancements but they are all still laggy and bogged down, whenever someone tries to connect their iPad to it I see them struggle with just opening iTunes and dismissing all sort of popups from their antivirus.

....................................

There is a lot of talent in the Mac OS X team, but maybe some have been pulled to iOS (GarageBand for iOS for example is quite impressive).

There doesn't seem to be a clear direction on what Lion should be and how it fits in the transition to an eventual seamless iOS on Mac experience.

Again, my theme of the year, with Steve unwell, there seems to be lack of cohesiveness. In this case, OS X seems to be floundering somewhat, not in terms of quality but in terms of substance.

To me, if Apple really needed to, Lion should be all about two things - One, for existing Mac users, give them real features they need (the wishlist is long, no doubt). Two, focus on an out-of-the-box pure intuitive experience for Switchers, of which there will continue to be many.

For example, the Dock needs to go. No new user nowadays can grasp its concept. Launchpad is good, but existing with the Dock seems confusing and Launchpad occupying the whole of a 27" screen might seem strange.

No additional multi-touch gestures. Stuffing more and more multi-touch may not be the best thing for new users because multi-touch on the trackpad is different, you control a surface then co-ordinate it with what you see on the screen. It is not a direct interaction of surface and screen like the iPad.

There are probably a lot of assumptions I'm making and this post is probably too long, but well, that's my 2 cents for now.

Please tell me you can finally use iTunes visuals as a screen saver. I know this can be done through Applescript, but it should be part of the OS. It would be nice if the Apple TV could somehow play iTunes visuals through airplay as well.

See, this is the stuff they should be putting in Lion!