AppleInsider Staff
Among Lion's core features are:
Mission Control: a powerful, entirely new feature that unifies Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, and full screen apps to give you a bird’s eye view of every app and window running on your Mac. With a simple swipe, your desktop zooms out to display your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full screen apps as well as your Dashboard, and allows you to instantly navigate anywhere with a click.
Launchpad: makes it easier than ever to find and launch any app. With a single click, Launchpad displays all your Mac apps in a stunning full screen layout where you can launch, re-order or organize apps into folders. You can also arrange apps into multiple pages and swipe between them.
Full screen apps: Lion brings the full screen experience that iPad users love to the Mac. With one click, your application window goes full screen, taking advantage of your Mac’s brilliant display. You can swipe from one full screen window to another and even back to your Desktop or Dashboard.
New Multi-Touch gestures: New Multi-Touch gestures and fluid animations give you a natural and intuitive way to interact with your Mac. New gestures include pinching your fingers to zoom in on a web page or image, swiping left or right to turn a page or switch between full screen apps and swiping up to enter Mission Control.
The Mac App Store: Apple's new online store that allows you discover, install and automatically update Mac apps.
Additional features in Lion include:
- A new version of Mail, with an elegant, widescreen layout inspired by the iPad; Conversations, which automatically groups related messages into one easy to read timeline; more powerful search; and support for Microsoft Exchange 2010;
- AirDrop, a remarkably simple way to copy files wirelessly from one Mac to another with no setup;
- Versions, which automatically saves successive versions of your document as you create it, and gives you an easy way to browse, edit and even revert to previous versions;
- Resume, which conveniently brings your apps back exactly how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;
- Auto Save, which automatically saves your documents as you work;
- The all new FileVault, that provides high performance full disk encryption for local and external drives, and the ability to wipe data from your Mac instantaneously; and
- Mac OS X Lion Server, which makes setting up a server easier than ever and adds support for managing Mac OS X Lion, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices.
“The iPad has inspired a new generation of innovative features in Lion,†said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Developers are going to love Mission Control and Launchpad, and can now start adding great new Lion features like full screen, gestures, Versions and Auto Save to their own apps.â€
Availability
The Lion preview is available to Mac Developer Program members through the Mac App Store today, and the final version of Lion will ship to customers this summer.
Update: Sources familiar with this first beta of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion have just provided AppleInsider will a detailed run down of feature enhancements.
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Amber Neely
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
109 Comments
Much more interested in this than bumped hardware, much as Thunderbolt looks cool.
Wonder if they have fixed it so Time Machine plays nice with FileVault and only backs up changes at a block level rather than the whole file...
This OS sounds vastly superior to snow leopard already. The autosave, versions, airdrop and filevault features all sound incredibly useful. Here's to hoping this, and much more pans out. Really think I want some kind of visual refresh tho
The saving and versioning features sound interesting but the big one for me is the inclusion of Server. That will certainly make my setup far more interesting and versatile.
Only concern maybe the cost with Server included, are we going to see >$200 pricing? What is it now, $500 for SL Server?
Software can be found here for registered developers: http://developer.apple.com/devcenter...lion/index.php
The full screen stuff provides opportunity for giving the UI a serious tweak, can't wait to try it - no matter how much I understand the reasons for the (imho broken) maximise (I know I know, but it's habit) button not actually maximising for many apps, I never liked it, I don't like even when it does maximise that it leave a sliver at the bottom to stop the app windows overlapping with teh dock too much...I don't maximise my apps because I need them to take advantage of the extra space, I usually do it to remove distration from a dozen other partial windows showing in the background.
Laundry list of wished for improvements would include (for a top 5 anyway):
1) Fixing Time Machine to backup at block level to speed up backups and take up less space on the backup drive
2) Fixing ToDo list items in iCal and Mail to actually be useful
3) Some sort of file sychronisation daemon that you can use to automatically shuffle selected files to your iDisk or another Mac (using this new Airdrop perhaps?) as and when changes are detected, sort of like Time Machine but for syncs.
4) Integrated file tagging within the filesytem/finder, improved tag searching in Spotlight, perhaps with auto-labelling (Label Red if tag is Bills etc)
5) Agent services that are actually useful - What does iTunes Helper do? It should sit there and make my itunes library available without having to start itunes, then my apple TV can stream from it automatically, using WOL without any interaction from me. Same goes for iPhoto libraries.
OK, some of those are iLife requests, and others MobileMe, but I consider it all a part of my OS as I use it all.