What's New in Lion?

Tossed into the myriad of Apple updates last week, was the biggest sneak peak of Lion—the next version of Mac OS X—Apple has given to date. With the release of a developer preview build, Apple demoed several of the operating system’s new features in greater depth than at the ‘Back to the Mac’ event last year. Lion marks the eighth iteration of Mac OS X, and takes some of the best ideas from iPad and brings them back to the Mac. Though items such as Mission Control, Launchpad, new trackpad gestures and the Mac App Store had been previously announced, yesterday’s preview unveiled a host of brand new features too. Some of the newly announced features of Lion include:

Mail 5

Taking a cue from the iPad—and the popular WideMail plugin—Apple has re-designed Mail’s default layout in Lion. This new view is specifically designed to take advantage of widescreen displays, and gives a full preview of a selected message while simultaneously displaying the inbox. In addition to the redesigned interface, Apple has improved search and message organization. Conversations—the final previewed new feature—threads and groups messages together to streamline a conversation making it easier to read.

AirDrop

AirDrop looks to make USB flash drive file exchanges a thing of the past. Instead of loading data too big to email onto a drive for a friend or co-worker, AirDrop sends it wirelessly. By clicking the AirDrop icon in a Finder window, your Mac will search for nearby AirDrop users—allowing for an easy wireless transfer to their downloads folder.

New Multi-Touch Gestures

Building off of their repertoire of established Mac trackpad gestures, and pulling heavily from the multi-touch innovations of iOS, Apple plans to include several new gestures in Lion. The following video showcases several of them.

All-new FileVault

Apple has upgraded FileVault—a mainstay since Panther—to be faster, more secure, and less obtrusive. Upgraded to XTS–AES 128 data encryption, FileVault better protects your internal and external drives. Presumably borrowing a feature from Find my iPhone, FileVault in Lion provides users the option to wipe their hard drive remotely should their Mac be lost or stolen.

Lion Server

IT departments rejoice! Apple has built in server functionality—traditionally a separate and pricey release—into the standard “client” version of Lion. The server component of the OS delivers easier setup and administration, better profile-based setup and management, the ability to publish and update Wikis and file sharing for the iPad.

Though all of these newly announced features nicely supplement those disclosed last Fall, Apple likely has even more surprises in the works. To take a more in-depth look at some of the features of Lion, click here.