What you need to know about the much awaited Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

With technology booming, people anticipate new products to be launched almost every day. One of the hottest products in technology today is the Asus slate PC. The gadget allows you to browse through websites and also allows you to reach to your friends or families located far away. Equally appealing are the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4. The new IPad 2 is very thin and light than the current version, with a higher resolution display as well as cameras for taking photos and video chatting. iPhone4 is embedded with various new features like Retina Display, stainless steel band, gyro and accelerometer, mic with speaker etc. However, Apple has come up with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion to topple the existing tallies. Though we need to wait for the official release, here are some details about the much-waited operating system.

mac os x 107 lion

What is it?

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is the world’s most advanced operating system expected to be launched by Apple Inc. this summer. It's an attempt to making clear Apple's philosophy regarding the future of its desktop operating system. The Mac is built upon a proven UNIX® foundation, coupled with a GPU-accelerated desktop, intuitive networking services, and system-wide optimization for multicore CPUs. Mac OS X Lion (version 10.7) will be the eighth major release of Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Apple had publicly unveiled the preview of Lion at its “Back to the Mac” event on October 20, 2010.

Updated version of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Preview 2 was issued by Apple to developers recently. In addition to releasing a preview of its Mac OS X Lion to registered developers, Apple is now reaching out to security experts to have the OS reviewed from a security standpoint. Apple is expected to launch Lion officially at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco in June.

For whom:

• Lion takes many design cues from the company's iOS system used in the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad products.

• Better resolution: Apple Mac OS X has a great graphical and textual fidelity, and it handles growing (and shrinking) key UI elements better than any other OS available in the market.

• Apple’s new Operating System Mac OS X 10.7 Lion comes with simpler, touch-friendly controls.

• Simpler app launching: One of Lion's feature is a UI overlay called Launch pad, which presents all of the system's available applications as a grid of icons, just like on the iPhone.

• Simpler app discovery, installation and maintenance: Mac OS X Lion includes an integrated App Store, and a number of other features like app discovery, integrated downloading and installing, integrated updating of apps, and licensing that allows for one app purchase to be used across any number of supported devices.

All these feature make Apple’s new Operating System Mac OS X 10.7 a much awaited technological operating software to be used by everyone.

Price and availability:

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion developer preview can be downloaded and installed by anyone, provided that you sign up to be a Mac developer first, which costs $99. Currently, Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server is sold separately from the general-purpose edition for $499, which ideally suggests that the post launch price of the Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is going to be more than $499. However, it is expected that the bundled cost of Lion Server with Mac OS X 10.7 be bit cheaper for customers rather than buying both separately.

The OS X 10.7 Lion is going to cost a lot more than the £26/$29 for an individual license, or £41/$49 for a Family Pack that Apple is currently asking for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Why the hype?:

The ideas Apple created on iPad is expected to be replicated via Mac OS X 10.7 Lion back to the desktop. But there are many other innovative new features like Launch pad, Mission Control and full screen apps which were previewed. Finding the system data or any other information is found in a much more easier and graphical way in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

Functionality:

1.Gestures and animations

Mac OS X Lion comes with a richer multi-touch and lifelike experience. The fluid, responsive animations that create the magical user experience on iPad and iPhone are available in Mac OS X Lion. The Mac also comes with rubber-band scrolling, page and image zoom, and full-screen swiping.

2.The Mac App Store

The Mac App Store makes it easier than ever for users to discover, purchase, and download your apps directly on their Mac. The Mac App Store is available now on any Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and will be a part of Mac OS X Lion.

3.Launchpad

The new Launchpad feature provides application 'pages' for the Mac giving you instant access to your apps.When Launchpad is invoked, application icons appear above the desktop displaying all your apps on your Mac; these can be clicked and arranged, and multi-touch gestures enable you to swipe between pages of applications. You can also arrange them any way you like by dragging icons to different locations or by grouping apps in folders. Thus, Lion will include application home screens, navigable via multi-touch gestures.

4.Full-screen apps

With Lion you can make a window in an app full screen similar to an iPad, you can access or switch from one apps to another with a swipe of the trackpad, without ever leaving the full-screen experience. The main advantage is that it lowers down on distractions,

5.Versions

Mac boosts to have a new feature which helps you to step back in time and see different versions of the document you’re working on. Though, it’s not full-on version control, but it does have the feature to cut and paste from an old version into the current document.

6.Resume

Resume feature helps you restart your Mac and return to what you were doing. In fact, whenever you shut down the Mac and relaunch an app, Mac even works when you quit an app; launch it again and it will start in exactly the same place you left it, with the small stipulation that this will only work with apps specifically made to support the feature.

7.Mail 5

Lion has a brand new version of Mail, Apple's much-loved email app and is inspired by the look and feel of the iPad's Mail application

Mac OSX Lions new Mailbox bar gives one-click access to your most commonly used Mail folders, Furthermore there are new search options which make it easier to find emails in your inbox than ever before. Mail 5 has a new Conversations view, which helps making groups email conversations together possible.

8.AirDrop

With AirDrop in Mac OS X Lion, you can share a file with anyone on your Wi-Fi network. The flip side is that it works only with other Lion users. By just clicking the AirDrop icon in the Finder sidebar, the Mac automatically finds other people nearby who are using AirDrop. In order to share a file with someone, all you need is to simply drag it to his name. Once accepted, the file transfers directly to the person’s Downloads folder.

What’s different?:

1.Mission Control - Mac command central

Mission Control intends to combine Exposé,Dashboard and Spaces, along with providing access to applications in full-screen mode. All the three different screen views would be merged into Mission Control. It's basically a one-screen overview of everything that's running right now on your Mac, including Dashboard and full-screen apps, all in one place.

2.Auto Save

You’ll only come to know how important auto save can be, If you've ever lost a file, you'll know how important auto save can be. With Lion's Auto Save, you can save changes in the working document, rather than creating a copy, thus helping not eat up disk space.

3.A new level of security – FileVault

File Vault enables you to password protect and encrypt your Home folder at the same place where you store all your documents. Lion makes File Vault's security more powerful by providing encryption for a whole drive, whether its local or external. It also gives you the ability to wipe data from your drive instantaneously, which might come in useful

4.Multi-user Screen Sharing

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion allows remote users to log into a separate user account from the one that is currently logged in. That means that while one user is logged into a machine; a second user can login to the same machine remotely, seeing their own desktop and user environment.

5.Improved Battery Life

Developers got a very positive feel of the battery life of Mac OS X Lion by running the dev preview of Mac OS X Lion. They were of the opinion that the Lion has a longer battery life than any another OS.

6.OS X Lion Server

For the first time Apple is going to unify both the normal and server editions of its OS into the same edition of OS X. The features of the Lion server are a new Profile manager, making it easy to set up profiles for Lion, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices, Wiki Server 3 and wireless file sharing for iPad users to access, copy and share documents in the server from Apple applications.