Mac OS X Lion 10.7 App revisions
Lion sees OS X's native applications revised. Address Book now resembles a physical book like the iPad version, with contacts listed on the left-hand page and individual contact details on the right. An icon disguised as a red bookmark ribbon is used to access your groups.
The change hasn't been met with universal enthusiasm. The current version of Address Book offers a three-pane view, with groups, contacts and details readily available. Switching to two panels for no better reason than to preserve a visual metaphor might be considered a backwards step.
An option to return to 'Classic Window' has been found in a debug menu; we hope it's available as a Preferences option for the final release.
Mac OS X Lion 10.7 Mail
Another OS X app that's adopted the look and feel of its iOS counterpart is Mail. The new version, Mail 5, makes much better use of its window space, showing a list of messages in your inbox and a full-height preview of the selected message. There's also a Favourites bar. A new Conversation View lets you thread messages from the same conversation in a timeline, even if the email's subject is changed. This makes an email exchange as easy to follow as a forum or newsgroup thread. Searching is also much improved.
Mail 5 is compatible with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and incorporates a powerful new search feature. Also, instead of a single flag to indicate an important message, you now have several coloured flags to choose from. This could prove useful if you want to flag different messages for different reasons or levels of priority.
QuickTime Player gains some features previously present in the paid-for Pro version of the application. You can copy and paste, insert a clip, crop, trim or rotate a video and resize your movie. Video sharing is built in, enabling you to export footage to MobileMe, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, iTunes and Mail.
Screen recording is enhanced, allowing you to record a section of the screen simply by selecting it with your mouse.
Signed for Preview has a very interesting new feature. Signature Capture digitises your pen-and-ink signature for use in documents and emails. You simply hold the paper version in front of your Mac's webcam and your signature is captured.
iCal has picked up a few features from the iPad version, and also a Year view alongside Day, Week and Month. Its layout has been simplified, with a very clean and tidy user interface.
iChat has also undergone a minor revision, with support for Yahoo! Messenger added.
Mac OS X Lion 10.7 Safari improvements
Finally, Safari benefits from Apple's new WebKit2 engine, making it faster and more stable. Codewise, each open tab stands alone like a separate app, so if a web page crashes, it doesn't take down the whole browser.
Unsurprisingly, much use is made of system-wide Gestures. They're so widely used and well integrated into Lion, we wonder how comfortable the new OS will be without them. Will those who use a desktop Mac without a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad feel they're missing out?
Developers with access to the Lion preview have complained that the vertical scrolling gesture on a trackpad has been reversed to match the iPad's. Previously, moving your fingers down on a trackpad scrolled the window downwards, matching the actions of a mouse's scroll wheel. Now it scrolls upwards, like on iOS devices where you interact with the window more directly. This could get very confusing. We hope it's optional in the final build.
There are some notable changes in Finder, the Aqua interface and the system in general. With Lion you can resize a window with all four corners, not just the bottom-right. Lion's scroll bars are similar to those in iOS, appearing when needed and fading after use.
Finder windows include a new sidebar option called All My Files. This gives you a handy overview of every file on your Mac, which you can then order according to date, kind, size, name and more. Interestingly, if you take a close look at the icon – a drawer full of documents – several of them show quotes from Steve Jobs.
OS X's popular Quick Look feature has been expanded. Spotlight search results can be previewed, as can URLs sent to you in Mail or iChat. You can also Quick Look within Stacks. Unfortunately, there appear to be no tabbed Finder windows, a feature we hoped would be introduced in OS X 10.7.
Mac OS X Lion 10.7 security and FileVault 2
On a technical level, the FileVault 2 security option now encrypts your entire hard drive, not just the Home folder. It encrypts as you work and decrypts on the fly using XTSAES 128 data encryption; we're promised it's totally unintrusive.
A recovery partition containing utilities found on OS X install discs can be used to restart your Mac after a particularly bad crash without having to boot from the optical drive, and SSD TRIM support has been added to keep solid-state drives optimised.
Perhaps most significantly, the server edition of Lion is incorporated into the client version. As Snow Leopard's Server Edition is sold separately for £417, this represents quite a saving for those who want to set up a Mac purely as a server.
A few features have fallen by the wayside. The developer preview of OS X 10.7 has no Front Row, so if you want to use a media centre with Lion, you have to install a third-party application such as Plex or XMBC.
Adobe Flash Player and Java Runtime are no longer installed by default but can be added manually, and the translation bridge Rosetta has gone entirely, with no option for it to be installed. Without it, applications written for the PowerPC architecture cannot run on Intel Macs.
If you open the System Profiler found in Applications > Utilities, click on Applications and sort them according to Kind, you can see what (if any) PowerPC apps you have on your Mac. If you're planning to upgrade to Lion, they must be upgraded or abandoned.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is Intel-only
Like Snow Leopard, Lion is Intel-only. The developer preview demands an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or later, though the full system requirements have not yet been released, and are subject to change before the final version is with us.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is shaping up to be an excellent release. With powerful and practical new features and some welcome polish on existing ones, it seems set to radically change the way we use our Macs. We may not have been excited when it was first announced, but we certainly are now.
Other Mac OS X Lion 10.7 features
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A version of this article was first published in MacFormat Issue 234
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