OS X Lion is our best OS yet. Not just because it’s packed with all these new features. But because of what those features add up to: one amazing Mac experience.
If you’re a geek, this page should keep you busy for a while. Here are a few of my favorite new features:
- Address Book: Address Book lets you quickly access the social network profiles for your contacts, including Facebook. Press and hold an email address to select the appropriate profile.
- FaceTime: Whenever someone tries to reach you, the FaceTime call rings through on every Mac you own even if FaceTime isn’t running.
- FileVault: With FileVault 2, instant wipe removes the encryption key from your Mac instantaneously, making the data completely inaccessible. Then your Mac performs an entire wipe of the data from the disk.
- Finder: As you type in the search field, the Finder dynamically suggests the most relevant matches based on the contents of your Mac. It searches for items such as file type, download source, sender, and label.
- iCal: In year view, iCal displays a map using colors to represent availability for each day, so you can see which days have more activities.
- iChat added Yahoo! Messenger and has a “unified buddy list” supporting both AIM and Yahoo! but what about native Google Talk support and MSN Messenger? I know you can support GTalk via Jabber but that’s not native or understandable for most users
- Also in iChat: Service plug-ins from third-party developers let you add new chat services to iChat. Installing a plug-in is simple. Once it’s downloaded, double-click it. Plug-ins run in a separate process to help ensure that they won’t damage your system. (maybe 3rd party devs will make service plugins?)
- Mac App Store: Even when an application is not running, the developer can use the Apple Push Notification service to deliver alerts to users. (I’m curious how that’s going to work. Like iOS 4 where it takes up the full screen or another way?)
- Mail: Exchange 2010 support Mail, iCal, and Address Book now support Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Exchange vacation notice. (when I’m traveling, I don’t carry my work notebook and rely on Mail (with Exchange), iCal, address book and Office 2011 to get most of my work done while on the road. This is a good thing!)
- Networking: In OS X Lion, your Mac can wake up for services such as file sharing, backup, and more without the need to turn on the monitor or attached USB devices.
- Preview: Preview makes it easy to add your signature to PDF documents. Hold your signature up to an iSight or FaceTime camera, and Preview uses sophisticated image processing to turn it into a pen-perfect signature annotation. With a click, the signature is added to your document, which can be saved or sent via email. It’s ideal for signing PDF forms and documents.
- Quicktime: If you open a video and it’s upside down or sideways, just rotate it to make it right. (my parents are going to love this)
- Safari: When you first log in to your Google, Yahoo!, or AOL accounts in Safari, you’ll have the option to use them with Mail, iCal, Address Book, iChat, and other applications on your Mac
- Also Safari: Web pages that use the HTML5 Canvas element can tap into the graphics processing unit on your Mac to display graphics and animations. With improved hardware acceleration for Canvas, games and interactive web applications render faster and smoother in the browser.
- Screen Sharing: You can remotely log in to a Mac with any user account on that computer and control it, without interrupting someone else who might be using the computer under a different login.
- Also Screen Sharing: You can now use an Apple ID to authenticate with another Mac running OS X Lion to start a screen-sharing session. This is perfect for giving others access to your Mac without creating separate user accounts. Simply add their Apple IDs to the list of authorized users, and they can log in with their credentials. (My parents are going to love this as well)
- HUGE Changes to Windows Migration: With OS X Lion, you can migrate all the information from your old PC to your new Mac. Lion automatically transfers your documents, contacts, calendars, email accounts (Outlook and Windows Live Mail), and photos stored in Picasa, and puts them in the appropriate applications.
- Time Machine: OS X Lion lets you take the Time Machine experience with you when you’re away from your Time Capsule or backup drive. Time Machine keeps a spare copy of the files you create, modify, or delete right on your Mac. Now if you accidentally delete a file while on the road, you can recover it from a local copy. (OMFG)
What a list!