Phil Schiller took the stage at WWDC after Steve Jobs introduced everyone to WWDC and brought Phil up on stage. Phil ran through a brief history of OS X over the years with a screenshot of Jaguar. Then he went on to show off some of the new features of Lion. There’s over 250 new features in Lion. Phil only showed 10 today at WWDC.
Some of the new features include:
• Multi-Touch Gesturing: multi-touch tap-to-zoom, pinching, two-finger swiping, “all with an incredible, physical realism that’s never been possible in a PC operating system before. Scrollbars are now non-existant if you’re using gesturing. They only appear when you’re scrolling.
• Full screen Applications: Apple gave us a taste of full screen apps when they released an update to iPhoto earlier this year, now they are expanding on the ability to full screen the applications. Full screen will now be available to many of the standard OS X apps. Safari, iPhoto, Aperture (already available), iMovie, iCal, Preview (can already as well). We’re sure more applications will come in the future.
• Mission Control: Mission Control couples Expose, Spaces, and Dashboard all together in an easy to use interface. You can now see everything that is running on your Mac while you use it. You can switch back and forth applications, documents, etc. with a multi-gesture swipe or by using your mouse and keyboard. If you’re zoomed out in Mission Control, just a quick tap of the spacebar will zoom up a window for a quick preview of the item.
• Mac App Store: The Mac App Store is the #1 outlet to purchase apps for your Mac. Beating out Bestbuy, Walmart, and Office Depot. The App Store is obviously built into Lion they’re adding in-app purchases, push notifications, and there’s a built-in sandboxing mode to boost security.
• LaunchPad: Launchpad gives you instant access to your apps with a hit of a button you can see your installed apps just like the iOS interface. You can arrange the apps in folders and you can also quick launch from the Launchpad interface.
• Resume: Phil explained, in the past when you would open and close applications, you’d usually have to restart from the beginning or load a previously saved document to get back to where you were when you closed the application. Now, with Resume you won’t have to worry about starting over. When you launch an application in Lion it brings you right back to where you left off. Windows, selections, tools, even highlighted text are just the way you left them. It works system-wide, including window placement, Spaces, everything
• Auto Save: We always seem to forget to save our work until something goes wrong and then we lose it. Now with the Auto Save feature in Lion, applications and documents will be saved automatically for those, just-in-case situations. You never know when an app might suddenly crash or when the power goes out in your home, you usually lose your work, now Auto Save has you covered. You can enter “Versions”, essentially a Time Machine interface via the application title bar and see your revisions and auto saves. You can also delete and or duplicate the document as well.
•Air Drop: Phil says this is a replacement for Sneakernet: i.e. using a thumb drive and running it over to a friend. Peer-to-peer sharing. Open up AirDrop and you’ll see all the other users who are running AirDrop. To share a file, just drop a file onto the user in question. They then will receive a notification that the file has been delivered. There’s nothing to configure, it just works.
• Mail: There’s a completely new Mail in Lion. Two or three-column view, snippets on the left, and a favorites bar to get to your hottest folders. There’s a new search feature that includes snippets and search suggestions. There’s also new conversation views. Shows all the messages all inline like you’re having a convo with the person. There’s better folder organization and a favorites bar as well.
• Other things: there’s a Windows Migration assistant, FileVault 2, FaceTime is built in, Lion Server add-on (apps you can purchase to run on top of Lion) and much more.
OS X Lion will only be available through the Mac App Store – “making it the easiest Mac upgrade ever” according to Phil. Go into the App Store, click “buy,” it downloads locally and starts the upgrade. There’s no disc version available. (sad!) You’re looking at a 4GB download, no reboots, and you can use it on all of your personally authorized Macs. You won’t have to buy multiple copies!
The price will be $29.99 for Lion.
