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 ESTApple introduced the Mac App Store (MAS) in its Back To The Mac event last October. It was released to public on January 6th and was automatically included in the 10.6.6 update. It’s obvious that the MAS is a spinoff of Apple’s extremely popular iOS App Store. While the MAS has been available for over six months now, Lion will bring some healthy improvements.
First, there will be support for in-app purchases. Since Apple does not allow trials, this is mainly useful for applications that can have additional commercial features or are subscription based.
Second, developers can now send push notifications to alert users. As in iOS, the usefulness of this feature varies from app to app, but the presence of third-party plugins like Growl speaks to the demand for this sort of thing.
Third, app updates are now just patches instead of full copies of the app. Apple refers to these as "delta updates," which is the traditional development term for an update delivered by replacing only the changed files/bytes in a application. In Snow Leopard and in iOS, you had to re-download the whole application to update it. That was very inefficient, especially if you were updating a bigger app. After iOS 5 comes out this fall, both it and OS X will feature app updates via patches, just like most other programs have been doing forever.
On a technical note, the structure of OS X application bundles makes them fairly well suited to these kinds of updates. But it's not clear at this time whether Apple is replacing whole files or doing binary patching to minimize the update size. Valve’s Steam service recently transitioned from doing file replacement to binary patching for this very reason, as games typically use a handful of large archives to store their content. For regular applications the difference is subtle, but the difference will have an impact on games distributed through the MAS.
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ebolamonkey3 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Not seeing them :(LeTiger - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Ever fix the 17in Sata 3 bugs????Such a shame to belligerently cripple their flagship laptop...
Conficio - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
"There is one huge limitation though: running apps in full screen in multi-monitor setup is unusable."As full screen apps are essentially spaces, there is a huge need (and there was for a long time) to be able to manage spaces per screen. All that would be solved if I coul switch between the spaces in a single screen only or move around entire spaces from one screen to another. That would solve this issue and allow a more task oriented kind of work, where you open a space for every task (or project in a multi tasking sense) you are working on and you can open the various apps you need to work on that project. But then that is the opposite of opening all past docs in an app (?)
Conficio - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
"If you were able to include the location in the Quick Add, Quick Add would actually provide a great overall solution for adding new events, but now you need to add the location separately, which kind of defeats the purpose."This concept is as ripe as a green banana. I want to be able to mark the text in an e-mail in order to create an event (with link back to the original e-mail). That way I can work with the lazy people that send invitations in any other format than calendar.
Byt the way go even one more step Appple, and scan all e-mail for addresses, contact info and events and highlight those and with a single click allow me to add the info to my address book or calendar (and with an option send to others in a iCal or vCard format). That would be real progress!
teryan2006 - Saturday, July 23, 2011 - link
umm… I've been doing what you describe, highlighting text in Mail in order to create an event since 10.5. (screenshot: http://cl.ly/25402N2W2E0n281W0r09 )Same thing with the email address and contact info. They've been in Mail ever since they added data detectors. http://cl.ly/3V2q0D1z1x1M1X2q0v1v
If you hover near an email address, time, date, street address, there's a dropdown button that shows up. New in 10.7 is QuickLook style preview for URL in a message
Did you disabled data detectors? Maybe that's why you're not seeing these things?
name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
"I don’t find any use for Launchpad. It's one of the less successful iOS imports - it doesn’t fit in, nor does it bring anything truly new,"I think this was a foolish comment. The first sentence is fine, the second is not.
Not every feature in an OS upgrade is targeted at the same collection of users --- I, for example, couldn't care less about full disk encryption.
I know for a fact that naive users (precisely the people who don't understand the file system, a class you seem to accept does exist) are completely unfamiliar with the Applications folder. For THIS sort of user, Launchpad is exactly what they need --- an easily understood way to run programs they don't frequently run.
As for you and I, we can just ignore it --- just I like ignore Japanese input methods, or LDAP support, or a hundred other aspects of my mac that aren't relevant to my particular situation.
name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
To follow up on what I said, comparing Launchpad with a Stacks view of the Application folder kinda misses the point. The sort of naive user we're discussing doesn't understand that he may have apps sitting on the desktop, or in the Downloads folder, or in the Utilities folder of /Applications.The Stacks view you describe is limited precisely because it is based on PLACE, not on on TYPE, whereas what users almost always want is based on TYPE.
The fact that it does not honor your pre-existing folder structure is, I would say, in Apple's eyes a temporary issue. Consider iTunes. iTunes doesn't create playlists based on how you grouped songs in the file system --- it assumes that your songs are stored in some bag in the file system somewhere that you will never look at, and imposes its own structure on that content. Launchpad is a vastly simplified version of that same idea, and part of the constant theme throughout Apple's past five+ years of UI work --- arrange content using appropriate metaphors in a high level app, NOT using a limited set of constructs at the file system level.
hanssonrickard - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
For example, then macbook pro 15" 2.4 Ghz Core2Duo from early 2008 does NOT support AirDrop.Here is compatiblitly list for it and maybe the article shouldbe updated with some kind of note that not all macs will support airdrop.
Info from "http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4783"
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Macs that support AirDrop in OS X Lion
The following list shows the earliest of each Mac model type that is supported. If your Mac is the same, or newer than the model listed, then it supports AirDrop.
MacBookPro (Late 2008 or newer)
MacBook Air (Late 2010 or newer)
MacBook (Late 2008 or newer)
iMac (Early 2009 or newer)
Mac Mini (Mid 2010 or newer)
Mac Pro (Early 2009 with AirPort Extreme card, or Mid 2010)
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makruger - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Too bad it won't run on normal PC hardware without becoming an iHackSapan - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Does anyone know for sure if OSX Lion enables TRIM Support for 3rd Party SSDs?I know 10.6.8 enabled TRIM for Apple SSDs.
Could you provide some background/link to how you got that info please?