Apple's newest iteration of their desktop operating system is out today, and we've been playing around with it to check out the newest features in OS X. Here's how it turned out.
You can see all the features in action in the video above. It's a bit Apple-cheesy, but it actually does a pretty good job of demonstrating how the new OS works. Here are our impressions on how they actually feel in action.
The Big Features
Lion boasts 250 new features, but there are a few that stand out from all the others, designed to make your life a lot easier. Here are the biggest changes in Lion, and how they feel when you use them.
Mission Control
Exposé, Spaces and Dashboard are have all been combined into one view called Mission Control, and it's actually pretty nice. Instead of spreading out all your windows, Exposé separates them by application, which makes it a bit less overwhelming when you have a lot of apps open at once. You can quick look windows for a closer peek before opening them entirely, as well as spread out windows from a specific application with a multitouch gesture.
When you enter Mission Control, you'll also see your spaces spread across the top of the screen. You can drag windows to and from spaces easily from this view, and go into any of your spaces with a click of your mouse. It's really nice that both features are now available with one hotkey; the whole interface is really nice for managing your desktops. The Dashboard is up there as well, but it's the same as it always was: isolated and kind of useless. Nothing exciting there.
Launchpad
One of the most underrated features in Lion is Launchpad, the iOS-style application launcher. You can still browse applications in the Finder, but if you hit the Launchpad icon in your dock, it presents them in a nicer way. That's pretty much it. Folders show up in typical iOS style, and you can fit more icons and scroll around less (since it's full screen).
I must say, Launchpad originally seemed like the stupidest feature in Lion, but it's growing on me a little. It's a better way to launch applications than the Finder or the Start Menu, especially since you can access it instantaneously with a nice four-finger multitouch gesture. That said, if you use Quicksilver, you will never use Launchpad. Ever. But it's nice to have a better app launcher built-in to the operating system for the non-QS users.
Auto-Save and Version Control
One of our favorite new features is automatic saving of all your working documents, complete with built-in version control. You've probably heard the phrase "save early and save often", and you might have even been unlucky enough to deal with the consequences of
not saving early and often in the past. Lion will do away with that stress by automatically saving files for you as you're working on them, so if something catastrophic happens, most of your work will be recoverable.
The
really cool part of this feature is that every time it saves, it saves a new
version of the file. So, if you make a change you don't like, you can revert to one of your older saves. Just hit a button and the app will enter a Time-Machine like view of the file's history. Seriously, it's almost exactly like Time Machine, which we've all come to know as one of the best OS X features in the past few years. It's great that they've made it even more useful.
Resume
Lion's also added session saving to all the apps on your system, which is great. When you shut down your computer, you can choose to save your session, so when you turn your computer back on, it restores all your windows, exactly as they were when you shut down. Of course, if you're on a MacBook, you can always achieve a very similar result by just closing the lid of your computer, but it's nice to have this feature for desktops, too (and if you dual-boot, it's fantastic, since you can reboot and pick up rigth where you left off). Similarly, when you quit an app, it will resume to the same state you left it when you restart it, which is new and convenient for both laptop and desktop users.
Full-Screen Apps
Lion makes a big deal out of full-screening your apps. Nearly everything is full-screenable. Some of the apps are just maximized versions of the window, while others act a lot more like an iOS app in full screen mode. In Preview, for example, you can full screen a PDF or group of images and flip through them with multitouch swipe gestures, just like you would on an iPad. It's pretty neat if you want a distraction-free environment, but like some of Lion's other features, it seems like it's trying to be iOS for no reason. I'm not sure why I would want to do this on a desktop or laptop computer. It seems to me that if I were reading something leisurely enough that I wasn't paying attention to anything else, I'd actually be
doing it on iOS instead of my computer in the first place. It looks good, though.
AirDrop
AirDrop is a cool new feature of the Finder that makes it really simple to share files between computers. Before, this was a somewhat confusing and frustrating process: you had to deal with network configurations, public folders, passwords, and other nonsense. Now, you just open up Finder, see all the nearby computers with AirDrop enabled, and you can send files just by dragging them onto a computer's icon. AirDrop will create an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network between the two computers and transfer the files for you—fantastic for less tech-savvy users that don't know how to
share files with someone sitting next to them.
Full Disk Encryption
FileVault can now encrypt an entire disk, which is more secure than its current implementation. It even asks you if you want to encrypt your drive as soon as you install OS X—which we've learned is
one of the only ways to keep an SSD secure. And, seeing that Apple's really starting to push SSD usage, it's nice to know they're thinking about it (incedentally, Lion
also contains TRIM support, to keep those SSDs running in tip-top shape).
Reading List
Reading List is like having
Instapaper built into your web browser, letting you save web pages to read later. It isn't quite as awesome as
Instapaper, in our opinion, but again, it's built-in, which is nice for those that don't necessarily know it's a feature that they want. Reading List will also sync with Mobile Safari in iOS5, which is what really makes it worthwhile.
The Apps
The interface is pretty much what you've come to expect from OS X. There are a few changes here and there (it looks like Apple's really going through with these monochrome icons they gave us in iTunes 10), but it won't shock you right off the bat—at least until you start opening up OS X's built-in apps. Here's how the new apps look and feel.
Mail
The new version of Mail looks much more like the iPad app than the old version, which makes it a bit easier to browse through your messages. You can show and hide the traditional inbox and folder sidebar with the click of a button, but not have it taking up space all the time. Threading support is still a little off sometimes, but it contains a new Gmail-like conversation view that is fantastic (not to mention quite pretty). It's also beefed up its search function, making it really easy to perform more complicated searches with plain English.
iCal
Like Mail, iCal has been revamped to look a little bit more like its iPad counterpart. The Week and Month views will look familiar, but the new Day view is great. It provides a schedule for your day on the right, along with a rundown of your upcoming events for the next few days on the left. You can also view your to-do list (now called a list of "Reminders") in a separate pane, like you could before. It also has a few brand-new features, like a "heat map" that tells you when you're usually the most free during the week, which is pretty useful (and cool). All this has been wrapped in a more lifelike "leather" look, which is interesting, to say the least.
Address Book
Address Book has a new interface that's very book-like, but otherwise not that different from before. Like iCal, it has a more "real life" appearance, getting rid of the title bar, the status bar, and the traditional "pane" view. For all intents and purposes it works the same as it used to, with the exception of a few small features like iPhoto Faces integration.
Finder
Finder doesn't look all that different than it used to, but it has a few tiny tweaks in it that are kind of nice. For example, the window toolbar in the Finder now has an "Arrange by" option, letting you quickly choose the arrangement of your icons in a given folder. You can also access these options via the right-click contextual menu. It also has a new "All My Files" function that gathers all of your documents, pictures, contacts, and other types of files in one window and sorts them by file type. It seems a little weird at first, especially since we have Spotlight (it keeps reminding me of The Onion's
MacBook Wheel parody). If you think about it though, it could come in handy if, say, you were looking for a certain PDF file on your system somewhere but you had no idea what it was called. Again, though, most of the time Spotlight's probably a faster file finder than this.
Finder also has some really nice usability tweaks, though, like collapsing icons together when you drag and drop a large number of files, or keeping two files with the same file name instead of making you delete one.
Other Interface Tweaks
Apart from the big stuff, there are little pieces of iOS all over this version of Lion. From the small things, like being able to turn off your dock lights, to bigger things like momentum scrolling. In fact, not only do you have momentum scrolling, but you have iOS-style scrollbars that
scroll the opposite direction that they used to. That is, if you're used to two-finger scrolling on a trackpad, it's now backwards by default: Instead of dragging your fingers down on the trackpad to scroll down, you drag your fingers
up, like you would to flick up or down on the iPhone or iPad. It's pretty off-putting at first. You can change this setting in System Preferences, but once again, it's something iOS-like that translates kind of oddly to the desktop, since you aren't actually touching the screen.
There are other small things, too. You can resize windows from anywhere, now, not just the corner. "Mail, Contacts & Calendars" has become a preference pane, more like iOS, and popups now fade in with a nice little animation. When you drag and drop files, they group together in a nice neat little icon, which is a bit easier to manage. You can even triple-click on a word to look it up in the dictionary or on Wikipedia, which is a pretty sweet little feature. Many of these additions are quite nice, while some of them are head-scratchers. For more info on all the tiny features, you can check out
Apple's full list of features in Lion, or try it out for yourself.
These aren't the only features in Lion (there are 250 of them, after all), but these are some of the ones we think are the most compelling. Hopefully, though, this gives you a more in-depth view of what's in store for the new version of OS X. Got any thoughts, rants, loves, or hates about the new OS? Let's talk about it in the comments.
