As expected the new Apple operating system – Mac OS X Lion – has been uncaged at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Speaking at the keynote session Senior VP of Marketing Phil Schiller and VP of OS X Craig Federighi demonstrated a Top Ten of the Lion OS’s features – which number at over 250 new and exciting additions. Mr. Schiller showing off Multitouch gesture, fullscreen applications and the “Mission Control” feature.
This was followed up by a hands-on demo by Mr. Federighi who presented us with a “two-finger swipe” – yes, thats what we thought – this would allow quick shuffling through web pages in Safari. He then went on to demo a series of apps at their glorious full screen potential. Apps on dsiplay such as the aforementioned Safari, also iPhoto and Photo Booth which has gotten a few new tricks thrown in – a “dizzy” filter to add a flock of circling birds and a characture effect which can distort facial features (or fixes them in some cases!).
“Mission Control” is a nice addition. Allowing for easy-to-manage and organise windows for multitasking – all those apps that were mentioned, at a convinient-to-user arrangement.
The Mac Store is a big feature in the OS X Lion and Schiller takes over at this point to tell us that this will bring opportunity for developers to intergrate and benefit from built-in sandboxing. Plenty to play with in a feature borrowing from the iOS App Store. Software updates and notifications will receive a push also, meaning things will become available alot quicker.
Launchpad, AirDrop and peer-to-peer WiFi also got a look in during the Lion keynote address along with an updated Mail feature with three column interface tracking conversations and organisation markers such as colour coding.
The Apple Mac OS X Lion operating system will be publically released in July through the Mac App Store costing only $30.
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