Mac OS X Lion Available in July

Some of the features in Lion include: new Multi-Touch gestures; support for full screen apps; Mission Control, a view of everything running on your Mac; the Mac App Store, built into the OS; Launchpad, a new home for your apps; and a redesigned Mail app.

New Multi-Touch gestures and animations built into Lion are designed to let you interact with content on the screen for a more intuitive use. New gestures include momentum scrolling, tapping or pinching your fingers to zoom in on a web page or image, and swiping left or right to turn a page or switch between full screen apps. All Mac notebooks ship with Multi-Touch trackpads and desktop Macs can use Apple’s Magic Trackpad.

Full screen apps take advantage of the entire display and are described as ideal for reading email, surfing the web or browsing photos, especially on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. With a click your app fills the display and you can swipe from one window to another, between full screen apps, or back to your Desktop, Dashboard or Spaces without leaving full screen. iWork and iLife apps, as well as Safari, iTunes, Mail, FaceTime and others, take advantage of Lion’s support for full screen apps.

Mission Control combines Exposé, full screen apps, Dashboard and Spaces into one for a bird’s eye view of every app and window running on your Mac. With a swipe, your desktop zooms out to display your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full screen apps and your Dashboard, and allows you to navigate with a tap.

The Mac App Store is built into Lion to get new Mac apps, buy them with your iTunes account, download and install them. Apps install directly to Launchpad, and with Lion’s release, the Mac App Store will be able to deliver smaller “delta” app updates and new apps that can take advantage of features like In-App Purchase and Push Notifications, the company says.

Launchpad is designed to make it easier to find and launch an app. With a Multi-Touch gesture, your Mac apps are displayed in a full screen layout. You can organize apps in order or into folders and swipe through pages of apps to find the one you want.

Lion includes a redesigned Mail app with a widescreen layout. The new Conversations feature groups related messages into a scrollable timeline, hiding repeated text so the conversation is easy to follow, and retaining graphics and attachments as they were originally sent. A new search feature allows you to refine your search and suggests matches by person, subject and label as you type. Mail includes built-in support for Microsoft Exchange 2010.

Additional new features in Lion include:

• Resume, which brings your apps back how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;
• Auto Save, which saves your documents as you work;
• Versions, which records the history of your document as you create it, and gives you a way to browse, revert and copy and paste from previous versions; and
• AirDrop, which finds nearby Macs and automatically sets up a peer-to-peer wireless connection to transfer files.

Pricing & Availability:

Mac OS X Lion will be available in July as an upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard from the Mac App Store for $29.99 (US). Lion will be about 4GB. Mac OS X Lion Server requires Lion and will be available in July from the Mac App Store for $49.99 (US).

Lion requires an Intel-based Mac with a Core 2 Duo, i3, i5, i7 or Xeon processor and 2GB of RAM. The Lion upgrade can be installed on all your authorized personal Macs.

The Mac OS X Lion Up-To-Date upgrade is available at no additional charge via the Mac App Store to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after June 6, 2011. Users must request their Up-To-Date upgrade within 30 days of purchase of their Mac computer. Customers who purchase a qualifying Mac between June 6, 2011 and the date when Lion is available in the Mac App Store will have 30 days from Lion’s official release date to make a request.

For more, visit the Apple website.