By AppleInsider Staff
Published: 08:30 AM EST
Apple on Thursday released a developer preview of Mac OS X Lion, which takes some of the best ideas the company has conceived for the iPad and brings them back to the Mac for the eighth major release of the flagship operating system due this summer. The beta also reveals a handful of previously undisclosed features such as AirDrop and FileVault
Among Lion's core features are:
Mission Control: a powerful, entirely new feature that unifies Expos, Dashboard, Spaces, and full screen apps to give you a birds eye view of every app and window running on your Mac. With a simple swipe, your desktop zooms out to display your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full screen apps as well as your Dashboard, and allows you to instantly navigate anywhere with a click.
Launchpad: makes it easier than ever to find and launch any app. With a single click, Launchpad displays all your Mac apps in a stunning full screen layout where you can launch, re-order or organize apps into folders. You can also arrange apps into multiple pages and swipe between them.
Full screen apps: Lion brings the full screen experience that iPad users love to the Mac. With one click, your application window goes full screen, taking advantage of your Macs brilliant display. You can swipe from one full screen window to another and even back to your Desktop or Dashboard.
New Multi-Touch gestures: New Multi-Touch gestures and fluid animations give you a natural and intuitive way to interact with your Mac. New gestures include pinching your fingers to zoom in on a web page or image, swiping left or right to turn a page or switch between full screen apps and swiping up to enter Mission Control.
The Mac App Store: Apple's new online store that allows you discover, install and automatically update Mac apps.
Additional features in Lion include:
- A new version of Mail, with an elegant, widescreen layout inspired by the iPad; Conversations, which automatically groups related messages into one easy to read timeline; more powerful search; and support for Microsoft Exchange 2010;
- AirDrop, a remarkably simple way to copy files wirelessly from one Mac to another with no setup;
- Versions, which automatically saves successive versions of your document as you create it, and gives you an easy way to browse, edit and even revert to previous versions;
- Resume, which conveniently brings your apps back exactly how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;
- Auto Save, which automatically saves your documents as you work;
- The all new FileVault, that provides high performance full disk encryption for local and external drives, and the ability to wipe data from your Mac instantaneously; and
- Mac OS X Lion Server, which makes setting up a server easier than ever and adds support for managing Mac OS X Lion, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices.
The iPad has inspired a new generation of innovative features in Lion, said Philip Schiller, Apples senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. Developers are going to love Mission Control and Launchpad, and can now start adding great new Lion features like full screen, gestures, Versions and Auto Save to their own apps.
Availability
The Lion preview is available to Mac Developer Program members through the Mac App Store today, and the final version of Lion will ship to customers this summer.
Update: Sources familiar with this first beta of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion have just provided
AppleInsider will
a detailed run down of feature enhancements.
