Apple releases dev preview of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion with AirDrop, FileVault

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/24/apple_releases_preview_of_mac_os_x_10_7_lion_with_airdrop_filevault.html

by sandipc • 15 years ago

156 140 15 years ago

Apple has updated their page on Lion with descriptions and screenshots of (all? At least all those mentioned in the linked article) its new features: http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

psykotic2• 15 years ago

How many of the coolest-sounding features like Auto-Save, Versions and Resume will require special support per application? Resume is the only one that seems doable without that; they can piggyback on the existing OS support for suspend-to-disk hibernation.

dchest2• 15 years ago

Auto-save and Versions work with document-oriented apps, so I guess they can also be doable without special support from app.

archenemy• 15 years ago

Resume looks good, and if properly coupled with Bootcamp it can be great. (think: run a Windows app from OSX, have it reboot straight into the app, and back to OSX as-it-was when you leave Windows :)

glhaynes4• 15 years ago

This is one of those things where having the platform vendor provide an app store (especially one that is presumed to become the dominant method of app distribution and that they've shown they're willing to "curate aggressively" when they feel like it) can allow the vendor to push forward faster - they can easily lay down the law that all apps on the Store have to support these features as appropriate by, say, 3 mos after Lion ships.

It prioritizes the platform vendor's feature desires over those of the developer or the users' direct vote, but I think it's wonderful for the industry to have at least one vendor (and one who arguably has good taste!) doing so.

beaumartinez2• 15 years ago

Full-screen apps, auto save, versions, and resume all have an asterisk in their descriptions: available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion.

Wientje• 15 years ago

I am guessing that these features are 'simply' a recompile away if the software uses Apple API's for all its document handling.

smackfu4• 15 years ago

Exactly. Currently OS X supports per-app Time Machine rollbacks, yet the only app I've ever seen support it is iPhoto.

villiros• 15 years ago

From what I can figure out, Auto-Save and Versions are pretty-much built-in. Assuming an application that uses standard Cocoa approaches to document management, it just needs to declare its support for the auto-save functionality, and pretty much everything else will be handled by the system libraries. Fairly trivial.

Resume is more involved, however: the application is responsible for (de)serializing its state. Again, for a document-based application that doesn't stray far from the "recommended" path, it should be fairly simple to implement. It's just a matter of the document and UI being auto-saved on termination, which requires little work from the developer. One very interesting side-effect of the Resume feature is that it removes the need for applications to stay running: the system can silently terminate unused applications, and bring them back if they're needed again. What's really exciting about this, is that it's turning applications into something that is "always there".

sandipc• 15 years ago

the video on that page of the new multitouch gesture support looks really useful

benjoffe• 15 years ago

In that video it looks like safari now auto hides the scrollbar when it's not being used (kinda like on the iphone), seems like an odd thing to do, since 20px of screen space isn't as precious on a desktop as it is on a phone.

koudelka• 15 years ago

jiTouch! http://www.jitouch.com

gks• 15 years ago

Am I reading this right? That Lion Server is included in the normal OS X Lion release?

That's pretty awesome if so. Means I'd be willing to fork over the cash for one of those Mac Minis to use for Calendar/Contact syncing instead of using MobileMe.

tvon• 15 years ago

Seems so, from the Apple page on Lion:

> Lion Server is now part of Mac OS X Lion.

Stormbringer10• 15 years ago

The developer program has always included the server versions.

At least it did up until they put out the iPhone developer program and didn't give the paid up Apple developers access without stumping up even more cash, which was the point where I rage-quit (would have been 2007 or 2008).

yardie2• 15 years ago

$500 -> $99. Depending on if you paid before or after the price change. Besides, $99 somethings gotta give. And all indications (atleast, recent indications) were pointing to Apple discontinuing the Server OS. Even though every version of OSX was basically server without the management tools, its good they brought the management to the desktop version.

tshtf• 15 years ago

Previously, only OS X Server was allowed to be virtualized (on Apple hardware). I wonder if Apple is going to open it up to everyone.

CountSessine2• 15 years ago

Probably not, but I really wish they would. It would make experimenting with programming kexts a lot less painful.

st3fan• 15 years ago

Screenshots or it did not happen!

jarin3• 15 years ago

Mail 5 looks almost exactly like Sparrow: http://sparrowmailapp.com/

Although, if Mail 5 is inspired by Mail on the iPad, it's probably more fair to say that Sparrow looks almost exactly like Mail on the iPad. Also, is that right that the developer preview is being distributed via the Mac App Store? How does that work?

I will say though, I'm looking forward to impressing potential clients with some fancy swiping at the coffee shop :)

Sidnicious• 15 years ago

I think more like MobileMe mail/iPad mail:

http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/#mail-5

flyosity3• 15 years ago

Actually, Sparrow looks exactly like Tweetie. Their UI is basically a clone of Loren's but with email messages showing instead of tweets.

charlesju• 15 years ago

The power of sparrow isn't the UI, it's the deep integration with gmail. More specifically, the labels are the killer feature.

Tyrannosaurs2• 15 years ago

For me it's the completeness of the integration - labels, starring, spam. There's not much you can do it the web client you can't do in Sparrow.

atourgates• 15 years ago

Yep. I've been trying to replace mail.app with sparrow for the past 2 weeks.

Sparrow's ui is mostly fine - but a bit frustrating at times. I find occasionally I miss new messages - something that never happened in mail.app.

But, it really does combine the best of both worlds between Gmail and a desktop app.

joebananas2• 15 years ago

Except that it doesn't seem to be a straight copy of a touchscreen UI shoehorned into a mouse and keyboard UI like Sparrow is.

mishmash• 15 years ago

> Also, is that right that the developer preview is being distributed via the Mac App Store? How does that work?

You get a "redeem" code from developer.apple.com that you enter into the MAS like you would an iTunes gift card, and Lion starts downloading.

Stormbringer10• 15 years ago

From the article: "Resume, which conveniently brings your apps back exactly how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;"

I really really hope they offer a "blow it away and restart from scratch" option for apps. Having to delete and reinstall apps on the iPad that have properly crashed (as in fall over, and then when restarted just crash straight away again†) is annoying.

I actually preferred the 'inferior' way of doing things back when iPad was single tasking, because hitting the home button would undo most programmer screw-ups.

†Not sure how they manage this, probably via some settings in their core data that they read in and then get borked up again each time. My theory is that removing the app and then putting it back in works because the persistent storage for that app gets reclaimed when removed.

swilliams• 15 years ago

You can force quit iOS apps. Double tap home to bring up the menu, then tap and hold the offending app icon. This will bring up the "jiggle" and a kill icon.

sjtgraham2• 15 years ago

Doesn't always work. Spotify on iPhone became irreversibly borked for me once, requiring me to delete the entire app and reinstall it

Stormbringer10• 15 years ago

I am aware of force quitting as per your proposed solution, but it doesn't always work, hence the need to remove the app and reinstall it.

Stormbringer10• 15 years ago

Your 'correction' does not apply. Apps that have crashed are no longer running, and hence force quit will do nothing.

Bud• 15 years ago

That's not force quit. That's uninstall.

To force quit, you stay in the app you are quitting, hold down the power button til you get the power-off bar, then hold down Home til the app quits.

joebananas2• 15 years ago

Looks like that's gonna be the case. Finder in 10.7 apparently hides $HOME/Library/, so you will have to bust out the terminal to remove b0rken settings.

getsat2• 15 years ago

Interesting. You can always

$ open Library

to open it in a Finder window.

thought_alarm2• 15 years ago

You can make any folder visible or invisible to Finder. It's just a file attribute:

    # SetFile -a V ~/Library

cobbal• 15 years ago

Snow Leopard (and probably earlier) already support this. When an app reopens twice after from the "reopen" button on the crash reporter it opens without loading the preference file.

andymoe• 15 years ago

I'm really excited about the new version of wiki server. (Scroll all the way down to the bottom)

Synaesthesia• 15 years ago

Netkas has confirmed the following about Lion: >Lion requires hardware with a Core 2 Duo processor or better. A lot of apps are sandboxed. OpenGL 3.2 support

I'm happy about the OpenGL 3.2 support. But what about 4?

robin_reala• 15 years ago

Every Core 2 Duo processor onwards has been 64-bit compatible; any Lion-only software can safely drop the 32bit portion of its binary.

ashleyw• 15 years ago

Drat. I wanted Lion on my old cira 2006 MBP with Core Duo. :(

rst• 15 years ago

Full-screen apps, increased emphasis on gestures, an app store... looks like they're trying to add an iOS feel to the user experience (at least within apps that use the new features).

YooLi• 15 years ago

I believe that was the whole point of the 'Back to the Mac' introduction to Lion from a few months ago--bringing iOS back to the Mac.

samps• 15 years ago

Anyone else catch this tidbit from Apple's site?

File Sharing for iPad: Lion Server delivers wireless file sharing for iPad. Enabling WebDAV in Lion Server gives iPad users the ability to access, copy, and share documents on the server from applications such as Keynote, Numbers, and Pages.

This sounds like the OTA iOS file sync we've been waiting for.

schrototo2• 15 years ago

Sounds more like the "Copy to WebDAV and "Copy from WebDAV" options currently present in all iWork apps.

Corrado2• 15 years ago

Couldn't you just use Dropbox?

blinkingled2• 15 years ago

Still no talk about resolution independent UI or some sort of DPI scaling. I have to wonder how people are using OS X on their 27" iMacs with very high-res screens. My eyes bleed on my 17" MBP with 1920x1200 - Windows DPI scaling works quite well for the most part.

sjs3• 15 years ago

Your MBP display has smaller pixels, about 130ppi (pixels per inch), while the 27" display is about 109ppi.

Stormbringer10• 15 years ago

Well, working on a larger monitor eventually weans you of the obsessive need to full screen everything.

Once you get used to working with documents scattered all over, and clicking on them to move them to the front and so forth, it becomes a more productive way of working.

I'm not sure what it was about Windows that drove everyone to the full screen way of doing things. I think possibly the thing is that all windows look so similar on Windows that there was never really any visual clue about where the window you wanted had gotten to, so it made doing that style of navigation much harder.

I don't think the scaling is particularly good in Win 7. From memory it used to be better. I recently had a crack at using it, and I played around with different resolutions. Every single resolution that I tried other than the native one was blurry. Some were only a little bit blurry, but some were very blurry. I remember it being better than that (maybe I've just gotten fussier). I ended up in the native (highest) resolution because anything else was too horrible.

br1• 15 years ago

Don't change the resolution, only the dpi settings, say, frm 96 to 120.

Groxx3• 15 years ago

>I'm not sure what it was about Windows that drove everyone to the full screen way of doing things

For myself, it's because so many applications have massive amounts of chrome and tiny vertical scrolling content areas. Height is necessary. Add to that that you can drag things above / below the borders of your screen, and unnecessary borders on everything, and no shadows to show "height", and your desktop becomes a cluttered, disorganized mess with too much scrolling in almost no time.

7 fixes a lot of that. You can drag things to the top of the screen to maximize, and pull away to un-maximize. Height via transparency and shadows. And a regression to thicker-than-ever borders :\ I guess you can't have it all.

blinkingled2• 15 years ago

As br1 pointed out - scaling DPI is what Windows does and OSX doesn't - not resolution as you appear to have tested with. No LCD is going to look good at non-native resolution - what you want to do is use the native res of the display and up the DPI in Windows to 120%. Works unquestionably well for most apps if you use XP Style scaling.

Raphael• 15 years ago

CRT monitors supported a range of resolutions, whereas LCDs are fixed in resolution.

Tycho• 15 years ago

I actually fear that the introduction of this 'full screen apps' feature is going to cause the death windowed usage on the Mac as well. The number of people I've wanted to slap for saying 'what's the point of having a big screen if you can't maximize your windows??'

smackfu4• 15 years ago

Especially when they are trying to move to full-screen apps, which work a lot better on my laptop than on my 24" monitor.

flyosity3• 15 years ago

Many new additions to NSImage internals and new API calls say otherwise...

fanf2• 15 years ago

Also Apple's multi-touch gesture demo video shows iPhone style webpage scaling in Safari on Lion, which I guess uses those APIs. But what about the rest of the UI?

brisance• 15 years ago

Pinch-zoom and tap-zoom allow you to view the content at greater magnification while retaining the UI control size so you don't lose context.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/#video-gestures

at the 1'00" to 1'28" mark.

jason_slack2• 15 years ago

if I enroll for $99 now would I still get a dev preview of Lion? I am already an iOS member.

allwein• 15 years ago

Yes. Whenever you enroll, all current member benefits are available to you.

You'll also be able to download the latest 10.6.7 build if you'd like.

jason_slack2• 15 years ago

sweet thanks!

DarthMark• 15 years ago

Do you still have to buy the production version when it ships?

tianyicui• 15 years ago

Of course you can. Why not? ;)

tptacek5• 15 years ago

Block-level full disk encryption would be a huge win, eliminating dependence on PGP, which is pretty close to abandonware at Symantec (a recent 10.5 dot release corrupted PGP WDE drives, for instance). Presumably, if it's cool enough to have a brand name at Apple, it'll also gracefully handle hibernation, which no FDE currently does.

Fingers crossed!

m0nastic• 15 years ago

A couple weeks back I tried to buy a single copy of PGP from Symantec's site (as other retail versions no longer exist), and it was an unmitigated disaster (you have to call their sales people, who try to get you to buy a site license).

A bunch of folks on Twitter apparently discovered the same thing this week.

Sounds like full ASLR might be in the cards for Lion as well (which would be nice).

mapgrep• 15 years ago

Sadly this feature comes just as SSDs are heading toward ubiquity -- whole disk encryption greatly slows down SSDs to near hard drive levels when done in software, as PGP users have learned (http://forum.pgp.com/t5/PGP-Whole-Disk-Encryption-for/PGP-WD...).

That said, some SSDs can do their own encryption in hardware, but they need OS support (via Trusted Computing Group standards) for it to be effective (storing the key within the controller would defeat the point). Hopefully this, too, will be supported under Lion. Certain versions of Windows 7 already support it.

In any case it's a very positive (if long overdue) move.

ryannielsen4• 15 years ago

Whole drive encryption (e.g. TCG Opal) has many drawbacks. Most importantly: it's "whole drive". There's no way to segregate individual user data and still get the benefits of hardware accelerated encryption. For systems that need segregated users (or even something like an unencrypted system volume with a single encrypted user), you need to toss encryption hardware into the upstream IO pipeline for any benefit. Sticking such hardware into the drive is too restrictive, and also raises the cost of each drive.

Furthermore, many chipsets (such as Nehalem and Sandy Bridge) have integrated AES acceleration that offer significant encryption/decryption performance improvements. While encrypted reads/writes will never match the performance of standard reads/writes, Nehalem and SB very much mitigate the performance hit and will still give multi-hundred MB/s throughput on fast SSDs.

If I were Apple, I'd ignore TCG Opal and focus on distributing Nehalem and Sandy Bridge throughout the product lineup. (Or, in the case of iOS devices, toss custom ASICS on the upstream IO pipeline.) Then you can offer true encrypted user segregation (or one encrypted user and an unencrypted OS volume) while still buying standard HDDs and SDDs in bulk. Win-win.

smallegan• 15 years ago

Any reports from HN users who have done the upgrade?

thought_alarm2• 15 years ago

So it looks like they are removing the need for the Quit command and the Save command, and are adding automatic document versioning.

In other words, Apple has finally brought the key features of Lisa OS to the Mac. It took a little longer than expected.

whatusername• 15 years ago

It took 6 years for the iPod to gain Wireless and more space than a Nomad. So I don't see why you are shocked about 27 years for complicated stuff like Versioning.

lovskogen• 15 years ago

Finally. Apple is getting rid of the default, always-on, scroll bar.

yoavniteflip2• 15 years ago

Anyone else catch the new power key to the right of the eject key on what looks like the 13"? Maybe I'm slow, but I was pretty sure the last generation still had a circular power button - is this from today's update on the machines? Scroll down to "Gestures and Animations" http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

yoavniteflip2• 15 years ago

My bad. That's the MBA.

enterneo• 15 years ago

no fullscreen mode for safari?

strmpnk• 15 years ago

Safari does fullscreen just fine from my own testing.

Samuel_Michon• 15 years ago

From Apple's Mac OS X Lion page [0]:

  "When you’re done with AirDrop, close *the Finder* and 
  your Mac is no longer visible to others."

I wonder if that's a typo and they really meant 'Finder window' instead of 'Finder'. In the current Mac OS X, you can relaunch the Finder but you can't keep it closed.

If the copy on the Lion page is accurate, then Apple is moving towards operation without the Finder, replacing it with Launchpad and Mission Control. I can see how that could work for first-time Mac users, especially those who already have an iOS device.

It reminds me of At Ease [1], an environment that hid the Finder from new users, offering something similar to Lion's Launchpad.

[0] http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease

seanb• 15 years ago

Ah, good ol' At Ease. The crippled app-launching interface it provided seemed to be entirely responsible for the nearly universal hatred of Apple computers by students at my high school. Compared to Windows 95, At Ease gave the impression that Macs were only capable of performing simple tasks. Everyone was thrilled when the Macs were replaced with cheap Windows machines.

CountSessine2• 15 years ago

No word on an HFS+ replacement.

Also, what's AV Foundation? Is this what QuicktimeX was supposed to become? Will we finally get codec plugins without having to program for the crusty old Component Manager?

stevenp• 15 years ago

Tried it briefly, but Dropbox won't even install on it. In addition, Evernote doesn't work (it seems to be relying on a private API that doesn't exist anymore) and NewsRack sync with Google Reader is completely hosed due to a memory leak that I'm assuming is a problem on 10.7 (but not 10.6 for some reason). Needless to say, I'm going back to Snow Leopard for now, since Dropbox is a vital tool for me.

darren_• 15 years ago

Does vmware fusion's support for installing OS X Server guests allow Lion Server?

Corrado2• 15 years ago

Its funny, but the first thing I thought of when I read about Versions is the old Vax/VMS file versioning system(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11#Disk_organization_and_...). That feature alone saved me tons of re-work in college. :)

mwg66• 15 years ago

Is it me or is Aqua being dropped?

Apple releases dev preview of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion with AirDrop, FileVault

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