Apple Unleashed Its Lion
Don’t be scared with this article’s title or the image on the left. I’m not talking about the King of the Jungle. “Lion” is the name of the eighth and current major release of Apple’s Mac OS X (version 10.7). It was released on July 20 2011, as announced during Apple’s third quarter 2011 earnings report. In the space of 24 hours, Mac owners in 123 countries around the world downloaded more than 1 million copies of the operating system. Lion is priced at $29.99 in the US Apple App Store – meaning that Apple earned close to one million dollars each hour during the first day.
Apple claims that there are over 250 new or changed features in Lion, including:
AirDrop is a service that provides the ability to share files with nearby users of the operating system wirelessly — no Wi-Fi network required.
Auto-correction now behaves much like on iOS devices, displaying suggested spellings below the word.
Auto Save – As in iOS, documents in applications written to use Auto Save will be saved automatically so users don’t have to worry about manually saving their documents.
Full-screen apps – Native, system-wide support for full-screen applications. Supporting applications have a new button in the top right of the app window. By clicking this button, the applications will be opened in full-screen mode. You can have multiple full-screen apps open at once — along with multiple standard-size apps.
iCal has an updated user interface, an annual view, and supports full-screen view.
iChat now has support for logging into Yahoo! Messenger. Users can audio and video chat with other iChat users using their Yahoo! accounts.
Launchpad – An application launcher that displays an icon grid of installed applications. Each application is represented by an icon, and Launchpad creates as many pages of application icons as you need.
Mac App Store – An application store built in the image of the iOS App Store. It was first released for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and, like in iOS, it lets you browse and download thousands of free and paid apps that you can start using right away on all your Mac computers authorized for personal use.
Mail 5 – Uses an iPad-like user interface, has a fullscreen-optimized view, uses chronological “Conversations” to organize messages and supports Exchange 2010.
Mission Control brings together Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, and full-screen apps to give you one place to see and navigate everything running on your Mac.
Multi-Touch Gestures transform the way you interact with your Mac, making all you do more intuitive and direct. Similar to iOS, additional gestures performed using a multi-touch input device will allow the user to scroll, swipe to different pages, and enter Mission Control.
Preview gets several features, including full-screen support and the ability to sign a document just by holding your signature up to an iSight or FaceTime camera, and Preview uses sophisticated image processing to turn it into a pen-perfect signature annotation.
QuickTime also gains several features like full-screen support, the ability to rotate clips, capture a region of the screen or share your video directly to Vimeo, Flickr, Facebook, iMovie, and Mail.
Resume – Applications are launched exactly in the same state as you left them as already seen in iOS.
Safari – With full-screen mode, tap/pinch to zoom in and out, improved graphics performance, and the ability of auto setup your Gmail and Yahoo! accounts in Mail.
Screen Sharing now allows remote users to log into a separate user account from the one that is currently logged in. That means that a user can login without interrupting someone else who might be using the computer under a different login.
Spotlight – Now you can drag items from the Spotlight menu and when you choose Search Web from the Spotlight menu, Safari opens and displays search results using your default search engine.
Terminal has extra features, including full screen mode.
TextEdit gains a new formatting bar that provides a convenient access to fonts, colors and other editing options. The new TextEdit also supports Apple’s new auto saving and versions technologies.
Versions – It works like a conventional version control system allowing you to keep an automatic record of your documents as they evolve. It also allows you to create a manual version of your document, compare various versions of your documents side-by-side, copy between versions, restore previous versions and delete older versions.
Image from http://www.apple.com
So what do you think about the new Mac’s version? Please, share your thoughts in the comments section.
