Apple unveils Mac OS X Lion
Speaking at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Phil Schiller, senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing at Apple, showed off Mac OS X Lion, the latest version of Apple’s desktop and notebook OS.
Schiller said that Lion is a major release of the operating system (OS) with over 250 new features, but that there was only time to showcase 10 key features of the new OS.
The ten features demonstrated were as follows.
Multitouch gestures
Schiller revealed that Mac OS X Lion can do momentum based scrolling, multitouch taps and pinch to zoom.
This will allow you to swipe through your photos, slides and web pages, he said.
Fullscreen applications
Schiller said that although they’ve had some fullscreen applications before, developers had to work hard to make their apps hand-coded to do fullscreen applications.
Lion now has a built-in a standard method for devs to build fullscreen applications, Schiller said.
A control in the top right lets users know where to tap and a swipe gesture lets users switch between open fullscreen apps and the desktop.
Schiller listed Safari, Mail, iCal, Preview, Photo Booth, iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, as examples of fullscreen-enabled applications for Mac OS X Lion.
Mission control
Called Lion’s best feature by Schiller, a gesture offers the user a birds-eye view of everything going on.
It’s similar to the existing Expose feature in Mac OS X, but groups windows by application.
Mac App Store
Schiller announced that as of Lion, the Mac App Store will be built into Mac OS X.
The upgrade to Lion will also not be available on disc, but can only be bought through the Mac App Store, Schiller later revealed.
Schiller also said that in-app purchases will be coming to the Mac App Store.
The Mac App Store will feature push notifications, sandboxing and delta updates, meaning you only download what has changed.
Launchpad
Mac OS X Lion will allow users to list and launch apps with a gesture.
A pinch motion causes all of your apps fly onto the screen and you can have multiple pages of apps that you can organize any way you want.
Resume
When you launch an app in Lion it will bring you back to where you were when you left off, Schiller said. It remembers the palattes, windows, and other elements of the applications and works system wide.
Whenever you log in with Max OS X Lion it will bring you back to the work environment as you left it after shutting down, Schiller said.
OSX-Lion
Auto save
Schiller also said that Lion automatically saves your documents in the background without you having to do anything.
He went on to explain that if you zoom in on the title bar of your document, the name of your document is now a menu that you can tap on with the options: “Lock, Duplicate, Revert to last opened, Browse all versions”.
If you don’t want autosave to overwrite your document you can lock it, but Liopn also keeps track of the versions of your documents.
Versions
Lion tracks the versions of your document as you create it, allowing you to take a manual snapshot if you need to. When sharing the document, others will only be able to see the current version, however.
The “Browse all versions” features brings up a Time Machine-like interface letting users interact with the different versions of their document.
Airdrop
Schiller also announced a DropBox-like document sharing feature Lion called Airdrop. It is a perr-to-peer file sharing system that sets itself up automatically on whichever network you’re connected to.
The default e-mail client in Mac OS X Lion includes new search features which recognises whether you’re looking for a person or a subject as you type, Schiller said.
A new conversation view splits out replies with attachments inline. Schiller said that this is to address the problem where as more and more people reply to something, the mail gets more indented and hard to follow.
Availability
Schiller announced that Mac OS X Lion won’t be available on optical disc, but only through the Mac App Store.
The operating system will be about a 4 gigabyte (GB) download and cost $29.99 (US).
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