Jobs shows off OSX Lion

Tue, 7th Jun 2011

FYI, this story is more than a year old

Another of Apple's hotly anticipated announcements was made earlier today at the company's annual developer's conference; OSX Lion.

Interesting to note that a lot of the iPad 'gestures', such as finger-pinching to zoom, are being migrated to OSX with this new update. Also, Apple uses similar language to Microsoft in introducing their respective new OS' (both are 'rethinking the desktop') - and ultimately both have a lot of similar approaches in design and operation. Do Lion and Windows 8 spell the beginning of the end for the humble mouse?

Lion comes packed 250 new features and 3,000 new developer APIs. The OS will be available in July as a download from the Mac App Store for $38.99.

New Lion features include:

Multi-Touch gestures;
System-wide support for full screen apps;
Mission Control, an overview of everything running on the Mac;
In-built App Store;
Launchpad, a new home for apps; and
A completely redesigned Mail app.

New Multi-Touch gestures include momentum scrolling, tapping or pinching your fingers to zoom in on a web page or image, and swiping left or right to turn a page or switch between full screen apps. All Mac notebooks ship with Multi-Touch trackpads and desktop Macs can use Apple's Magic Trackpad.

Mission Control combines Exposé, full screen apps, Dashboard and Spaces into a bird's eye view of every app and window running on a Mac. With a swipe, the desktop zooms out to display open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of full screen apps and Dashboard, and allows users to navigate anywhere with a tap.

The Mac App Store is built into Lion and will be able to deliver smaller 'delta' app updates and new apps that can take advantage of features like in-app purchase and push notifications.

Launchpad displays all apps in a full screen layout. Organise apps in any order or into folders and swipe through to search.

Lion requires an Intel-based Mac with a Core 2 Duo, i3, i5, i7 or Xeon processor and 2GB of RAM. At only 4GB, the Lion upgrade can be installed on all personal Macs.

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