The release of a Developer Preview of Mac OS X Lion may have been obscured by Thunderbolt and the new MacBook Pros, but it was exciting nonetheless. Until yesterday, we knew very little about the next version of the Mac OS. The initial unveiling in October only hinted at what was to come.
Among those features we knew about were; the App Store, which will be a part of the Lion installation; Launchpad, which Apple describes as ‘a new home for all of your Mac apps’; system-wide support for full screen viewing of applications; and Mission Control, which pulls together Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard and full-screen apps in one interface.
At the time of that unveiling, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs said ‘Lion brings many of the best ideas from iPad back to the Mac, plus some fresh new ones like Mission Control that Mac users will really like.’ And it’s clear that Apple is intent on continuing that iPad theme: Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing commented yesterday that ‘the iPad has inspired a new generation of innovative features in Lion,’
One of the ways in which the iPad has most obviously influenced Lion is in the interface design of some of the built-in apps such as Mail, iCal, and Preview. Apple’s screen shot of Mail 5, as it’s called, shows a two-pane interface with message subject lines and summaries on the left and a preview of the selected message on the right. It’s almost indistinguishable from the iPad’s Mail app, save for the toolbar along the top and the row of Safari-style toolbar bookmarks beneath.
In that screen shot one thing is notable by its absence: a list of accounts and folders. The leftmost button in the mailboxes toolbar above, however, reveals your full set of mailboxes when you need access to it. The list of folders in that toolbar can be customised, too, and if you’re using rules to filter messages for a particular project or meaning to a subfolder then you’ll be alerted by adjacent unread item counts.
There are improvements to the functionality of Mail’s search bar. Most immediately visible is a list of live search results that the application thinks are relevant. They’re organised into categories, so if you type a word that happens to be someone’s first name, all matching contacts are displayed in one group in the list. Messages that match the term in their subject line are grouped below that. Search terms added to the bar are actionable. Say you add “Steve Jobs” as a contact, his name appears as a token (in pill-shaped enclosures, much like keywords in iPhoto) with a clickable left segment that allows you to switch between matching against messages sent to or received from that contact. It’s a more immediate way to build complex searches in Mail, rather than having to create a Smart Mailbox.
Mail 5 also features Conversations — an improvement on Mail’s current message threading system, and not dissimilar to that used in Gmail and in Sparrow. In fact, Mail 5’s interface looks a lot like Sparrow.
There’s lots more to Lion than mimicking the iPad. At long, long last Mac OS X gets a system-wide auto-save feature — a boon for those of us who all-too-often realise 1000 words into a document that we haven’t saved it yet. Unlike auto save features in the likes of Word or Bean, Apple says that Lion’s Auto Save doesn’t create a new document but saves changes in the working document. There are, thankfully, safeguards built-in to stop you irrevocably saving those changes you don’t want.
Coupled with Auto Save is a revert feature which allows you, at the click of a button, to put the document back to the way it was when you first opened it. Rolling back through previous versions of the document takes place in a Time Machine-style interface that shows the latest version on the left and previous versions stacked to the right. You can roll back to an entirely different version, but these are, in fact, active documents from which you can selectively copy and paste just the portions you want.
The Resume feature allows you to restart a Mac or an individual application without having to save documents individually and the re-open them. It remembers how things were when you quit and puts them back that way when you restart.
There’s a new file swapping system called AirDrop which lets you send a file to anyone in the vicinity. AirDrop appears in the Finder sidebar, and clicking it displays user account icons of potential recipients in a dynamic arrangement; in the demo we received, they were displayed in an arc across the pane’s width. Drop files and folders onto a person’s name and an alert pops up on their Mac to ask if they want to accept the transfer. When they confirm, the files are delivered directly to their Downloads folder.
The new version of File Vault uses XTS-AES 128 data encryption at the disk level. And Apple says it’s ‘fast and unobtrusive’, which will be a relief to anyone who has used it in the past. And Apple has made it easier to install the Server version of Lion, which should mean that we mere mortals, rather than just systems administrators will be able to get our heads around it.
Those are the features Apple has so far made public. In the day or so since developers got their hands on Lion, however, a number of others have come to light. Among them are support for what Apple calls ‘HiDPI Displays.’ This seems to be a replacement the idea of resolution independence which has been around since Mac OS X Tiger and would allow the operating system and applications to support extremely high resolution displays in the same way that iOS and apps support the iPhone 4′s Retina Display. And Apple also seems to have added support for Trim to Lion. Trim, a software technique for combatting the performance degradation that afflicts solid state storage was discussed in detail here by MacUser’s Alex Watson.
For a deeper look at Mac OS X Lion, make sure you grab a copy of the 18th March issue of MacUser.
