Mac OS X Lion Roars to Macs this July
Yesterday, at its WWDC keynote event, Apple provided attendees with an detailed glimpse at the successor to 10.6 Snow Leopard: Mac OS X v10.7 Lion. Announced at last October’s “Back to the Mac” event, Lion has been under continuous development previously holding a loose “Summer 2011” release date.
Yesterday morning, Apple’s Phil Schiller took the stage to unveil many additional details about the OS, including a more concrete release date (July) and pricing. Perhaps the most unique aspect of Lion is that it will be the first version of Mac OS X to be available exclusively via the Mac App Store. This change is as significant as the jump from floppy to CD-ROM in the earlier days of Mac OS. Taking a cue from the popularity and accessibility of Snow Leopard’s price point, Schiller announced that Lion will sell for $29.99 when it lands in the MAS next month.
After delivering an update on the performance and popularity of the Mac, Schiller shifted his focus to 10 of the more than 250 new features included in the new OS. The earlier half of Schiller’s talk focused largely on features teased last year. No longer in their infancy, features such as the Mac App Store, Launchpad, Full-screen apps and Mission Control were thoroughly demoed—showcasing their fluid and seamless interactions with each other.
Additional features such as the completely reworked Mail, AirDrop WiFi P2P file transfer and Multi-touch gestures were also demoed. While the keynote marked the formal debut of the three aforementioned features, they were included in February’s developer preview build and widely documented. To learn more about these features, click here.
Schiller also announced several entirely new features of the OS to supplement those already mentioned. These included:
Resume:
Resume is a revolutionary new feature that enables closed apps to reopen right where you they left off. Particularly useful for palette heavy apps such as Apple’s iWork and Adobe’s Creative Suite, Resume effectively eliminates the need to “setup” a workspace whenever an application is reopened. Taking things a step further, Resume even enables Lion users to restart their machines and return to exactly where they left off.
Auto Save:
As its name implies, Lion has auto save functionality built-in. The feature—which works system wide—will automatically save progress as users work. Combined with Resume and Versions, this feature looks to make Command-S a relic of the past.
Versions:
Working in conjunction with Resume and Auto Save, Versions is a Time Machine styled chronicling of the history of the documents on a machine. Saving different states as users work, Versions enables Lion users to travel back in time to view or harvest from previous versions of a document.
All three of these features—as well as those previously covered—look to revolutionize the Mac user experience. Elevating the concept of a desktop operating system to include the best aspects of its mobile iOS seems to be a winning strategy for Apple. With improved usability, functionality and stability Lion looks to be a release worthy of its majestic title.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion requires an Intel-based Mac with a Core 2 Duo, i3, i5, i7 or Xeon processor, 2GB of RAM, and Mac OS X 10.6.7. For additional information on Lion, click here.