OS X 10.7 "Lion" is the eighth major release of OS X, and comes with a new philosophical approach to the Mac. Apple has been using OS X for the "Mac OS" as well as the underlying OS for the AppleTV as well as the iOS on iPhones and the iPad, and is now looking to bring some of the innovations in the iOS back to the Mac OS to enhance the Mac experience.
The first is multitouch gestures, a feature that has been progressively implemented into OS X with Apple's multitouch trackpad, Magic mouse, and Magic trackpad input devices. While many might imagine a touch-screen option for notebooks, Apple is not going to go in that direction, indicating user fatigue as the main problem with that approach, but also that it is just cumbersome for most users. Instead, Apple will be concentrating on the horizontal approach to gestures and inputs that we have seen in the multitouch trackpads, and is leaving the onscreen gestures to mobile devices.
The second feature is the implementation of the Mac App Store on OS X. This is available as a standalone application that you can put in your Dock, which will open and show a view into the store similar to the iTunes store. It will allow you to better discover new applications as well as offer easy one-click purchasing and installation of applications. When applications are purchased, they will immediately show in the Dock along with a progress bar indicating the download and installation progress for that application. When the progress bar is done, the application can be launched immediately.
While Apple is advertising the new App Store for Lion, the program will be available for Snow Leopard within 90 days, so stay tuned. Apple has a developer kit to hopefully get other applications into the store besides its iLife and iWork suites, and we expect that like the current App Store for the iOS, it will populate rather quickly.… Read more
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