Back to the Mac: OS X 10.7 Lion Review
by Andrew Cunningham, Kristian Vättö & Anand Lal Shimpi on July 20, 2011 8:30 AM ESTAnother of Lion's much-hyped features is Resume, the ability of the operating system and of individual apps to restore themselves to their last-opened state. Unlike Versions, support for Resume doesn't appear to require any effort on the part of developers.
When shutting down or logging out, the OS will now offer to reopen your windows when you next login - you can opt not to, but the option is enabled by default.
Individual apps will now do the same thing - if you quit Word or Preview with items open, all of those items will reopen the next time you launch the program. This is only optional to a degree - there's no way (as best as I can tell) to disable resume for an application for a single instance as you can do with the OS. Your options are limited to enabling/disabling Resume for the entire user account using the control found in the General control panel.
OS X stores information about application states in each user's profile, specifically in the now-hidden Library folder. Navigate there and open the Saved Application State folder, and you'll see folders for storing the states of every app you've opened on your Mac.
As with many of Lion's features, whether you like Resume will probably depend on how you work. In certain situations - crashes and restarts due to updates, for example - it's convenient to have all of your windows spring back open. Resuming individual apps was a bit more annoying - I actually like getting a clean slate when I reopen programs, so I found myself pressing command-W a bunch of times to close windows before I'd press command-Q to quit the program.
The main trouble for me is that all of your windows re-open whether you're just launching the program from the Dock or whether you're trying to open a specific file - I'd double click a Word file and get four different documents open at once instead of the one I actually wanted.
At best, Resume makes restarting your computer less troublesome than it once was. At its worst, it encourages and enables bad user behavior - the sort of people who will appreciate Resume the most are the same people who leave dozens of unused windows open in the background at all times, sucking up RAM and slowing down their computers. I can't tell people how to use their computers, but I can scold Apple for helping people use them poorly.
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ebolamonkey3 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Well, since Apple retains 30% of the App price, I'm not sure if that figure above is talking about the total amount that customers have spent buying songs and apps, or if that's Apple's revenue (ie: 30% cut) of the pie.PreOmegaZero - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Microsoft names the OS versions as such (6.0 vs 6.1) because changing it to 7.0 (like they admit they should have done) broke many older apps/installers that did OS version detection.So the version numbering is simply from a compatibility standpoint.
darwinosx - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
These aren't service packs. Its a silly comment which tells us you either don't know what a service pack (which is a Microsoft term for Microsoft software) actually contains or you didn't read this review.Belard - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Service packs? Apple uses actual version numbers, but in the past few years - they've only been patching Snow Leopard.The difference in XP SP1 / SP2 / SP3 is bug fixes, security patches and a few things here and there, but feature wise, no difference. XP-Home/Pro are visually different than XP-MCE (Which is XP Pro with a nice visual face lift but with VPN ripped out).
I think Apple charges like $50 for a 5 user license upgrade... much better than the lame Win7 (Vista and XP) charging $100 for an upgrade disk which is messy when it comes to a clean install.
anactoraaron - Sunday, July 24, 2011 - link
"much better than the lame Win7 (Vista and XP) charging $100 for an upgrade disk which is messy when it comes to a clean install."You have no clue about which you speak. Win7 upgrades/clean installs are simple for even the simplest minds-present party excluded apparently.
name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
An improvement? Uhh, you are aware that Snow Leopard ALSO sold for $29?The more interesting points you should be making are that:
- $29 gets you the right to install the OS on EVERY mac you own. It's right there in the TOS. For most people this won't matter much, but for those with a desktop machine, a laptop and a HTPC, it's rather cool.
- and you get the right to virtualize two instances, if you care
- and note the conspicuous absence of any sort of DRM covering the OS, not to mention the home/home mini/pro/ real pro/enterprise/super singing & dancing version crap that MS offers up.
(And, BTW, you get the Dev Tools for free. They were $5 in SL, but I think they've dropped to $0 with Lion.
As far as I know, Dev Studio is not free, not close.)
ATimson - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Assuming that by "Dev Studio" you mean "Microsoft Visual Studio", yes, they have a fully-functional free version.name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
How come when I go tohttp://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/en_US/...
I see a bunch of different prices, from $3,800 to $400, but no $0?
I'm not being pissy, I really want to understand what is going on here.
Ryan Smith - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
How can you buy something that's free?http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/produc...
kosmatos - Monday, November 4, 2013 - link
It's 2013 now, and you were spot on, quicksilvr.