Apple this week announced that OS X Lion will be available for only $29 starting in July
It’s been an insanely busy week for Apple. From WWDC to an assortment of lawsuits and even some recallediPad 2s. But let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Apple this past Monday kicked off its annual WWDC event with a keynote speech where it first took the wraps off of OS X Lion, the latest iteration of its desktop operating system.
With over 250 new features, Apple is touting Lion as a major release. And much like its strategy with Snow Leopard, Apple will be selling OS X Lion for only $29 via the Mac App Store. It remains unclear at this point, however, if the OS upgrade will also be available via disc.
In any event, here are a few of the upcoming features users should be excited about.
First off, there’s Resume. Resume is a nifty little feature that takes you right back to where you left off in an app if it freezes and needs to shut down or if you accidentally quit. In a similar vein, OS X Lion brings with it Auto Save and Versions. Documents typed in Lion will now be auto-saved every five minutes while the Versions feature will take snapshots of your document every hour. In other words, your work is continuously and perpetually being saved. The Versions feature operates similarly to the visual history feature in Safari and is a great way to go back to a particular iteration of a document you’re looking for.
Next is AirDrop. AirDrop is Apple’s replacement for “sneakernet” to the extent that it provides users with an easy way to transfer files to other Macs on Wi-Fi within 30 feet. This is a godsend for those files that are simply too large to email and when a handy USB stick isn’t in sight.
Also completely revamped is the Mail app in OS X. Indeed, Apple spent a lot of time going over many of the apps new improvements, and there were quite a few. Smart search functionality, in particular, is worth mentioning. Apple describes it thusly:
Search tokens let you refine what you find. Say you do a search for John Appleseed. Mail displays a token in the search field. With one click of the token, you can instantly narrow your search results to include just the messages to or from John. Or only the ones where he’s mentioned. You can combine multiple tokens to find the tiniest needle in the biggest haystack.
On other new and welcome feature in Mail is dubbed Conversations. Conversations automatically sorts messages from the same conversation thread. It’s similar to how Gmail currently operates, only Apple’s implementation appears to be a lot sleeker. And further helping matters is that users have the option, when viewing Conversations, to hide redundant text from previous messages. This is certainly welcome for those extremely long email threads where users have to traverse through a ton of earlier replies before getting to the pertinent message.
Some other new features that Apple had already showcased at previous events include Launchpad, new multi-touch gestures, support for full-screen app mode, and Mission Control.
For a full breakdown of the new features in Lion, Apple has an easy to navigate and informative page dedicated to their upcoming OS X release.
Again, OS X Lion is a steal at $29, but one pressing issue is whether or not the upgrade will be available exclusively via the Mac App Store. If so, this might prove problematic for computers that don’t access the Internet (think Government) and for school computers that might struggle, on the whole, to download a 4GB update for each machine.
