Some new features were announced at the "Back to the Mac" keynote in October 2010, and the Apple website was updated in February 2011 with more details. Other features were announced at the WWDC 2011 keynote or on Apple's OS X Lion Web site after the keynote. Apple stated that there were over 250 new or changed features in Lion, including: •
Address Book uses an iPad-like user interface. It also includes improved Yahoo support and FaceTime calling. •
AirDrop – Lion-to-Lion direct file sharing via
Wi-Fi Direct, with no
wireless access point required. •
Address space layout randomization – Address space layout randomization (ASLR), a security technique that puts important data in unpredictable locations, making it harder to target known weaknesses, is available for 32-bit applications, and "has been improved for all applications", in Lion. •
Apple Push Notification Service – Send over-the-air alerts, such as news updates or social networking status changes, using Apple's Push Notification service to applications that support APNS. APNS allows OS X Lion and iOS clients to receive push changes to items such as mail, calendar and contacts from a configured OS X Lion Server. • Auto-correction behaves much like on iOS devices, displaying an iOS-like popup box. •
Auto Save – As in iOS, documents in applications written to use Auto Save are saved automatically so users do not have to worry about manually managing their documents. The Auto Save feature significantly alters traditional workflow patterns and is a controversial addition to the system. •
Emoji support – Apple has added a new Emoji font commonly used in chat to express
ideograms. • Exposé in the Dock, a way of activating
Exposé for a single application from the
Dock, a feature added in
Mac OS X 10.6, is altered. One must double-tap with two fingers on a dock icon to initiate single-application Exposé, or simply right-click or control-click and select Show All Windows. •
FaceTime comes bundled with Lion. •
Finder improvements – Finder search allows multiple search criteria to be specified without creating a smart folder, Finder search offers suggestions, files can be grouped by various attributes, and one can merge files under two folders with the same name – a prompt appears asking to replace or keep both files. The navigation sidebar lost the ability to show the specific icon of a map or volume (by default; there is a hack to still add the old ability), instead it shows a grey standard map icon. •
Font Book 3 – Font Book 3 provides more flexible displays of character glyphs supplied by a particular font face. Duplicate font files are flagged with a warning icon, and can be fixed automatically or resolved manually. However, full screen mode is not supported for dual screen setups. • High-quality multilingual speech voices – users can download new high-quality voices in more than forty languages and dialects. •
iCal has an updated user interface, an annual view, and support for a full-screen view. •
iChat has support for logging into
Yahoo! Messenger. Users can audio- and video-chat with other iChat users using their Yahoo! accounts. •
Languages/
Localization –
Arabic,
Czech,
Turkish and
Hungarian are added as full system languages, to make the total number of twenty-two languages available in Mac OS X. •
Launchpad – An application launcher that displays an iOS-like icon grid of installed applications. It features the ability to make multiple pages and group apps into folders that function the same as folders in iOS. •
Mac App Store – receives support for in app purchases as with iOS, and alters the update mechanism to no longer create a separate copy of the app, improving performance. •
Mail 5 – Uses an iPad-like user interface, has a fullscreen-optimized view, uses chronological "Conversations" to organize messages, and supports Exchange 2010 (but not through the
Exchange ActiveSync protocol, as
iOS). • Mission Control replaces the "All windows"
Exposé feature. It gives an overview of all running applications just like "All windows" but groups windows from the same application. At the top of the screen it gives quick access to the
Dashboard,
Spaces, and running full-screen applications. •
Multi-touch gestures – Similar to iOS, additional gestures performed using a multi-touch input device (e.g.
Magic Mouse,
Magic Trackpad) allow the user to scroll, swipe to different pages, and enter Mission Control. While this is not the first official multi-touch support for Mac OS X, it has been expanded; other frameworks, such as Lux, have already created multi-touch support. • Multi-User Screen Sharing – The built-in Screen Sharing feature allows remote users to log into a separate user account from the one that is currently logged in. While one user is logged into a machine, a second user can log into the same machine remotely, seeing their own desktop and user environment. •
Preview gains several features, including full-screen support and the ability to sign a document just by holding a signed piece of paper up to the camera. • Profile Manager provides several features, including push notification-based management of OS X Lion and above. •
QuickTime reincorporates some features from QuickTime Pro. New features cited include Copy/Paste, Insert Clip, Crop Video, Rotate Video, Resize, Trim, and more Export options. •
Safari – With full-screen mode and the new
WebKit2 layout engine. • System Information – This feature is a re-design of System Profiler, which has been completely altered with new views which display graphical information on displays, storage devices, memory usage along with other hardware information. The previous layout remains available by clicking "System Report". Early builds of Lion also used System Information as a replacement for "About This Mac", although the final release reinstated the version of this dialog box found in Snow Leopard. •
Terminal has extra features, including full screen mode. •
TextEdit gains a new graphical toolbar with font selection and text highlighting. The new TextEdit also supports Apple's new automatic file saving and versions technologies. • Versions –
Time Machine-like saving and browsing of past versions of documents for applications written to use Versions. The developer release notes may also be of interest.
Server features •
Wiki Server 3 – Making it easier to collaborate, share, and exchange information. Users can quickly switch between a server's home page, My Page, Updates, Wikis, People, and Podcasts. File sharing is simpler, and a new Page Editor is added for easy customization.
User interface changes • Buttons moved from a pill shape to a more squared-off appearance. • Progress bars were made flatter and a bit lighter in color. • Tabs, when selected, have a recessed and darkened appearance as opposed to previous versions which used an aqua blue highlight. • The color on sliders, combo boxes, help buttons, and selects was removed. • The red, yellow, and green buttons in the
window decorations have also been made slightly smaller with a less glossy appearance. • Windows can be resized from any corner or edge of the window, similar to window resizing in
Microsoft Windows and many
window managers for X11. The traditional bottom-right resizing grip was completely removed, even when scrollbars are configured to always be shown. • Scrolling is reversed by default, to act more like a touch screen device. Content moves in the direction of finger movement on touch-pad or mouse (with the scrollbar moving in the opposite direction), rather than the scrollbar moving in the direction of finger movement (with the content moving in the opposite direction). Also, like in iOS, scrolling "bounces" when the scroll bar hits the top or bottom of the window. • When resizing a window by clicking on the green zoom button, there is now a transformation animation. • New windows fly to the front (like opening an app in iOS). • The dashboard is its own space in Mission Control, rather than in previous versions of OS X where the widgets simply flew in and the background dimmed. As a result, there is no more "ripple effect" on the background when adding a widget, as was seen on previous versions of Mac OS X that had the previous dashboard. Users have the option to return the dashboard to its previous configuration in System Preferences.
Dropped features •
Save As – replaced by Duplicate and Revert functions due to the introduction of Auto Save and Versions (only applies to applications modified to support Auto Save, such as
TextEdit; applications not modified to support Auto Save, such as
Microsoft Word, retain this functionality). •
Front Row, a media center application. The application has been copied into Lion by third-party users, however its incompatibility with iTunes 10.4 renders some features useless. •
Rosetta, software that makes possible the execution of
PowerPC software on
x86 hardware, is no longer available. Programs requiring Rosetta to operate are not allowed to be distributed via the Mac App Store. •
Adobe Flash Player and Apple's
Java Runtime Environment (JRE) are not included in new installations of Lion, but both can still be downloaded and installed manually. Apple is no longer actively maintaining its JRE, but
Software Update offers to download Snow Leopard's JRE when a user tries to run a Java program and the JRE is not installed. Programs using Java are not allowed to be distributed via the Mac App Store. however, iSync v3.1.2 from Snow Leopard continues to work. •
Remote Install Mac OS X, software that allows OS X to be installed using the Remote Disk feature. Using
Target Disk Mode, users can circumvent this omission. This is replaced by the Recovery Partition, which does exactly the same thing but without needing an external disk, as long as the hard disk is not damaged. •
Apple USB Modem is not compatible with Lion. •
QuickTime Streaming Server, software used to deliver video and audio on request to users over a computer network, including the Internet. •
WPA Enterprise configuration for wireless networks was replaced by the requirement to obtain a configuration profile. •
The Post-Install Welcome Video was removed. ==Reception==