Apple has announced prices and deployment plans for its education and business customers installing Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, with licenses starting at $29.99 in volume.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will unlock the latent capacity of recently released Thunderbolt MacBook Pro and iMac systems to use faster 450 Mbps 802.11n wireless networking, thanks to triple send and receive antennas capable of supporting three spacial streams of wireless traffic.
Safari 5.1 in Mac OS X Lion adds a new window-integrated downloads popup menu with behavior that appears to be borrowed from iPad.
The upcoming release of VMware's vSphere 5 virtualization platform is reported to include guest OS support for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, indicating new options for enterprise use of Apple's server platform without the now discontinued Xserve.
The third developer preview release of Mac OS X Lion reverts an experimental change in how tabbed panes are drawn and animated, dropping a iOS-like slider animation to present the active tab as simply a depressed button.
In Mac OS X Lion, Apple's iTunes Screen Saver shifts from a way to passively display album art into an interactive way to play music.
In Mac OS X Lion, Preview 5.5 gains the ability to view Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents and expands its PDF annotation features.
Apple has already demonstrated a variety of changes on the way for Mac OS X Lion's Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, and Spaces, but there are a variety of interesting details about how these components will work together, and how new multitouch gestures will make them effortlessly available.
Mac OS X Lion adds polish to the bundled Dictionary app, with new dictionaries and an improved multi-pane interface. The system also improves overall dictionary functions with enhanced Spotlight integration and multitouch support for inline text lookups.
Apple's next desktop operating system release will tone down much of the Aqua user interface and change how screen captures handle windows' drop down sheets.
Mac OS X's bare bones text editor gets some attention in the coming release of Lion, adding support for vertical layouts for East Asian languages, as well as a graphical menu bar with font selection and text highlighting.
The next version of Mac OS X will deliver an updated version of iChat capable of logging into Yahoo IM accounts, providing an improved experience when using multiple accounts, and adding web page sharing in iChat Theater.
Apple's iCal 4.0 in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion's second Developer Preview adopts an iPad appearance and a new annual view.
In Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Screen Sharing morphs from a simple VNC remote screen viewer into a multiuser, Fast User Switching Remote Desktop solution similar to Microsoft's Terminal Services.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion makes system wide changes to standard folder ownership and permissions to enhance security, finding and recommending changes where necessary.
The release of Mac OS X Lion will debut a new development framework called Scene Kit, which developers say will support easy to implement 3D rendering within their apps.
The upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion and Lion Server dramatically simplifies file sharing, removing official support for FTP and Sun's NFS file sharing protocols while adding a new WebDAV option making it easy to share files with iOS devices.
The upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Server will remove the formerly bundled open source Samba software and replace it with Apple's own tools for Windows file sharing and network directory services.
Apple has added a new Wi-Fi Diagnostics utility to monitor the performance of wireless networks, record events, capture raw network frames, and log diagnostic data that can be sent to Apple by users for troubleshooting.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion introduces a new feature in the Finder named AirDrop, designed for easy file sharing between nearby systems.
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Daniel Eran Dilger
AppleInsider Staff
