Infinite Monkey Blog

From the moment you boot it up Lion screams sophistication and agility. The newly redesigned login screen greets you with stylish simplicity. The users picture hovers just above a simple password field in the centre of the screen.

The Wi-Fi status indicator, battery monitor (if you’re on a Macbook) and clock are displayed in the top right of the screen. Centred at the bottom of the screen are the sleep, restart and shut down buttons. The stylish brushed aluminium backdrop is reminiscent of the start-up screen that will feature in iOS 5.0. In fact a user could be forgiven for saying that Apple was inspired by the iPhone/iPad, that’s because they were. Gestures that were once the mainstay of the iPad and iPhone have found their way onto the multi-touch trackpad or surface of the MagicMouse. Scroll bars are a thing of the past. Scroll bars are now gone and only visibly while scrolling. This has been done to save screen real estate. And, speaking of screen real estate Apple apps like Mail, Safari, iCal etc are full screen but still offer easy access to the desktop or other applications by simply swiping the trackpad.

Ease of use was clearly top of mind when Apple went to the drawing board on this one. In addition to full screen apps, Apple had to create an easy way to move amongst them. They needed to find a way to slide from a full screen app back to the desktop or between other apps that were currently running, and they already had the ideal platform to build on, Exposé. When Exposé was introduced in Leopard, another innovative feature was added called Spaces. Spaces allowed users create desktops with groups of apps in them and move them around and even change the order of the Spaces. In Lion it’s as if Exposé and Spaces mated and had a love child. And they call this child Mission Control. Mission Control combines the functionality of Exposé and Spaces. Users can have multiple desktops and move apps around in between them, the current desktop they are working on is centred in the middle of the screen so that they can switch between apps on their current desktop, shift those apps to another desktop or drag in apps running on other desktops to the current desktop. Mission Control gives full screen apps a home on their own dedicated desktop. A four-fingered swipe up the trackpad or hitting the keyboard shortcut (F3) puts you in control (users have the option of placing an icon on the dock). You can quickly get between desktops in sequential order with a three-fingered swipe to the left or right. Traditionally full screen apps have been a rather unruly bunch – look great but are notoriously difficult to navigate between. Mission Control is seamless and makes full screen apps significantly easier to work with.

What draws the computer illiterate to the Mac is the dock. This semitransparaent grey bar contains all the apps you’d use on a daily basis. What do you do when there are apps you want to use that are installed on your machine and are not on the dock? The traditional way to do this was open finder, find your Applications folder and click on the app you want. Apple remedied this with Stacks. Drag any folder onto your dock and it becomes a pop-up menu with a gorgeous 3D special effect when it opens. It was fast, it was efficient but it could be even better. So when Apple decided that it was time to improve upon the humble stack, they turned to the iPad. Launch Pad looks a lot like the home screen of the iPad. Dock down the bottom, icons laid out across the desktop above. A five-finger pinch motion on the track pad will bring this up or simply click the rocket icon in the dock and you can see all your apps in one place. I say one place because Launch Pad doesn’t care where your apps might be hiding – on an external HDD or in the documents folder, it will find it and display it on your desktop for easy access.

Don’t you hate it when you’re working on a document, then the installation you were running in the background finishes and requests a reboot? By this stage you have a tonne of windows open. To reopen them, find where you were up to or navigate to the right page is time consuming and a pain in the arse. Well Apple have thought of that too. When you shut down or log off, just click the check box next to “Reopen windows when logging back in” and when your Lion roars all the windows you had open magically reopen. It’s as if you never left. Apple apps now sport an autosave feature, that means when you are typing a document in Pages or working on a presentation in Keynote you no longer have to hit the save button after making changes. The computer just remembers what you did and lets you pick up from where you left off.

That’s just a few of the 250 new features in Lion. Do yourself a favour and get your hands on the update today. You won’t need an install disk, OS X Lion is the first OS release by Apple that support delta upgrades. That means you purchase, install and upgrade your machine online through the Mac App Store. New Macs’ will come preinstalled with OS X Lion. If you don’t have access to the Mac App Store, Apple will have OS X Lion USB thumb drives available next month from the Apple Store Online for $69US. You can always take your Mac into an Apple Store and purchase the upgrade there and have a Genius install it for you. If you run a small business or have a home network and require the server edition, download the normal version from the app store. No seriously, the server version is already embedded in Lion you just need to download the server apps from the Mac App Store for an extra $52.