9 ms·

OS X 10.7 “Lion”: The King Of The Apple Jungle, The Last Of Its Kind, Or Both?

80 points by ssclafani 16y ago

jsz0 16y ago
Apple didn't put a mouse driven UI on a tablet. Why would they put a touch driven UI on a computer? Jobs has said he views PCs are trucks. Based on that statement I think 10.7 is more likely going to be about keeping the truck drivers happy.
- wriq 16y ago
  Well there is http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2010/08/the-mother-lode-welcome-to-the-imac-touch.html http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2010/08/the-moth... , which would add touch elements to iMac's.
  - tjogin 16y ago
    Every Apple patent doesn't result in a shipped product or feature. This is Apple we're talking about; they love secrecy, don't want nobody to know what they're doing. Some of the patents they've filed are probably just ideas, some of them make it into products or features, and some are probably red herrings, meant just to throw their competition off.
- easp 16y ago
  Apple didn't put arrow keys on the first Mac either. A couple of years later, they did. You know why they waited? Because they wanted to make sure apps that were written to take advantage of the new UI, rather than ported from purely keyboard driven UIs. Why would they put a mouse UI on their first tablet, particularly when Microsoft has demonstrated what a mediocre result that gets you. I see no reason why, having established touch UI patterns on iOS devices, Apple would have any reason not to start introducing such things on the desktop. And really, have you been in a pickup lately? They have a lot of car like amenities, like antilock breaks, air conditioners, decent stereos, etc.
  - enneff 16y ago
    Right, because it's _really_ ergonomic for me to reach out and touch my display.
    - megablast 16y ago
      Sometimes it is useful, very useful, most time it isn't. This does not mean it is a bad idea.
    - carbon8 16y ago
      Desktop touch functionality wouldn't necessarily be added to the primary display. Apple has filed patents for using touch screens for keyboards and trackpads. Even if it was for the primary display, apple has a patent for a movable display that is oriented horizontally when used as a touch screen. It's not clear how or whether would add desktop touch features, but they've clearly considered it.
    - loewenskind 16y ago
      Touching your display is a horrible idea (I wonder how those new windows machines that do this are selling) [1], but the trackpad on the MBP is the thing that finally made me buy one. [1] Imagine working whole day having to hold your arms up to operate the mouse cursor. My arm hurts just thinking about it.
zdw 16y ago
I hope this is a sign that Apple is going to focus more on their desktop experience, if only because there aren't any new/hot/rumored devices to release. Apple also has it's own tick/tock of releases, between developer features and end user features - 10.4 and 10.6 being the former, and 10.5 being the latter. Thus, we're probably going to see a lot of new whiz-bang end user features in 10.7. "Unification" already exists - iOS and MacOS X core OS and kernel code is fairly similar, as is much of the userland API. It's different for obvious reasons (many to do with touch/hardware limitations), and unless those differences go away (which I don't see happening - touch on an iMac form factor = serious arm pain), I don't see much point to the talk of unification.
- Zev 16y ago
  Additionally, some big APIs from iOS have been (or look to be) available in both OS's. CoreLocation and AVFoundation, at the very least. And the multitouch framework on each OS is very similar, even if the prefix isn't. It wouldn't be too hard to abstract that away, if one needed to.
  - DeusExMachina 16y ago
    I can add that the Mac API needs a little bit of polishing now. I just went back to develop a Mac application (for internal use) after developing on the iPhone, and certain things are not that intuitive or easy to use as on the iPhone. Is not really a big difference, but Mac API could use a little more consistency learned from the iPhone API.
- sachinag 16y ago
  There is a rumor of a substantially redesigned MacBook Air.
  - easp 16y ago
    Which is probably as much driven by the fact that the air hasn't been updated in quite a while as it is by any facts. But who knows, it will be true at some point.
angstrom 16y ago
Or just a sudden switch to Thundercats character names to throw everyone off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ThunderCats_characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ThunderCats_characters
brisance 16y ago
My wild-ass guess is that Apple is going to let the apps from iOS run in a sandbox environment on OS X 10.7, which really shouldn't be that hard to do since development code runs on emulated iOS devices. This would broaden the reach of the iOS ecosystem.
- thought_alarm 16y ago
  > which really shouldn't be that hard to do since development code runs on emulated iOS devices. That's incorrect. Apps that run in the iOS Simulator are compiled to i386 code and run as a native OS X processes. They are essentially OS X apps that link to UIKit instead of AppKit. Edit: That's not to say Apple couldn't support such a scenario. Many App Store apps are already fat binaries that include ARMv6 and ARMv7 code. No reason why they couldn't include i386 code as well to facilitate running on Mac hardware.
  - brisance 16y ago
    Yes, and the "not that hard" remark was in reference to their deep experience moving from 68K to PPC to x86. So, having fat binaries is not a foreign concept to them at all. Apple has filed a patent on OS-level advertising. http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/10/22/jobs-and-apple-seek-patent-on-operating-system-advertising/id=6761/ http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/10/22/jobs-and-apple-seek-patent-... Integrating iOS apps (where users are already conditioned to being exposed to advertising) with some version of OS X would not be a big leap from a technical or business strategy perspective.
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  I suspect that Apple's heading down the same road as XNA, because XNA enables a developer to build WPF applications that can run on Windows, XBox, and Zune; presumably also on the latest Windows Mobile as well. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if future versions, maybe even the upcoming release, set up an equivalent situation on the mac platform, now that Apple has a new TV device in addition to the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Heck, if Apple decided to be aggressive about getting into the living room and entertainment center, they could launch a box that's basically a souped up Apple TV with something close to an order of magnitude higher performance than an XBox 360 simply by building it around a Sandy Bridge, and have a significant contender in the gaming console market.
thought_alarm 16y ago
I'm hoping the next version of OS X will finally bring us true resolution independence, to correspond with some high DPI "Retina" MacBook displays. I also expect they'll provide new ways for developers and/or users to leverage both iOS and OS X; perhaps that's where cloud computing will come into play. Other than that, I don't think we're going to see any more huge innovations in desktop computing, from Apple or anyone else. All the action is in mobile (and development tools).
- j_baker 16y ago
  I can't help but think of "640k should be enough for everybody" when I read this. Desktop computing isn't as sexy as mobile computing, but it isn't dead yet. There are plenty of innovations left to be made.
  - jseliger 16y ago
    This is fair, but I also think about an essay I read (from Kevin Kelly? It might be in his new books, _What Technology Wants_), in which he points out that, basically, we've hit a plateau of about 60 MPH landspeed for most journeys. If you chart a graph of "how fast people get around on land" from 1715 to about 1950, you see a steady rise. After that, you just see... us being steady. Ditto for air flight: from the dawn of aviation to about 1960 or 1970, you see steadily increasing speeds. Today, most planes still fly at about ~500 MPH (I think), just like they used to. Although there are still lots of micro-innovations going on with cars, rail, and planes, they've basically hit a maximum airspeed. I suspect something similar might be going on with the current paradigm of desktop operating systems. Since around ~2005 (when Windows XP's service packs finally caught up to virus / worm writers and OS X Tiger brought stability and full text search), nothing in operating systems has made a tangible difference in my life. Compared to the jump from DOS to Windows 95, or from 95/98 to XP, or the late versions of Mac OS to the early versions of OS X... the current changes in operating systems just aren't that great. Which isn't to say "consumer OSes are dead"—but they've probably hit a spot where the major problems have been solved. The innovations are smaller than universal protected memory, fast, full-indexed search, and the like. The key words above are "for this paradigm." Mobile represents the next obvious computing paradigm, and that might be a good thing. For better or worse, Microsoft has "won" the desktop and will probably never lose it. The company appears to mostly be competing with itself these days (I say, writing from an iMac).
dasil003 16y ago
The event isn't for another week. Are we going to be subjected to a steady stream of contentless speculation from the Apple pundit set for the next 7 days? I'm actually really excited for the announcement, but I couldn't care less what MG Siegler's opinion of it is.
- gabrielroth 16y ago
  The speculation should be pretty easy to avoid, if that's what you want to do.
  - dasil003 16y ago
    Right, I'll be ok. This was just my attempt at discouraging people from upvoting the next 20 such articles without resorting to the this-isnt-hacker-news-please-sandblast-me meme.
zppx 16y ago
I was expecting the new release to be named Maine Coon or Cougar, jokes apart I hope some new improvements in Finder, file searching, some cool features for new hardware and a complete system compiled by clang. Maybe a bunch of small new software, I particulary would love a serious package manager, a interface to deal with launchctl and a working useradd that works with DirectoryService.
gamble 16y ago
Predictions: * 10.7 "Lion" (obviously) * iLife 2011 (with FaceTime in iChat), iWork 2011 * New Mac replacing MacBook Air with a swivelling touch screen * iOS app support on OSX, utilizing said touch screen
- jeremymcanally 16y ago
  This is purely made-up dreaming, but I hope your last point comes in the form of a Dashboard-like thing that lets you easily launch iOS apps. Pop it up and launch when needed, hide it when you don't.
  - X-Istence 16y ago
    Personally I never use Dashboard, it was cool to play with for a couple of hours and after that the novelty wore off. It really hasn't seen any innovation at all, and overall feels out of place. If they put iOS support in Mac OS X that would be awesome, but I hope they do it in a way that they are just like other apps on my desktop that can be put in the dock. That way I am much more likely to use the apps.
    - cubicle67 16y ago
      I use it (dashboard) almost daily. most used app is a great javascript based calculator (can eval almost any js), and iStat for viewing processes FrontRow, on the other hand, I use rarely. When I do, I'm glad it's there though
      - gamble 16y ago
        I use it regularly as well, (calculator, calendar, weather, stocks, and iStat) but I agree with the previous poster than developer interest in dashboard widgets is pretty minimal these days. It would be great if I could run arbitrary iPhone apps in the dashboard alongside my widgets. I think it makes sense for Apple as well, since the value proposition for iOS to developers is shaping into an argument that, yes, there are a lot of Android phones out there, but there are a huge number of iPod Touches, iPads - and perhaps now Macs - in the hands of customers that can run the same iOS apps.
qq66 16y ago
Apple: "We ran out of cat names, let's use Lion." Press: "Apple is changing their OS architecture!"
- aaronblohowiak 16y ago
  You don't think Lions are cats?
  - qq66 16y ago
    I meant, "ran out of cat names except Lion, which we were avoiding for precisely this reason" :)
bch 16y ago
How did this even end up on HN? It says nothing. Save your two minutes.
- lovskogen 16y ago
  Like most articles, I only read the HN comments, that's where the good stuff is – not in the articles themselves. For this kind of articles, anyway.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
newsfu 16y ago
The user interface elements in MacOS are supplied by AppKit, in iOS it's UIKit. What I expect to see is a marriage of the two with AppKit perhaps reimplemented with UIKit classes. Fracturing UIKit isn't unprecedented, it's already done on iOS with the iPad having widgets and features not available on iPhone. UIKit is cleaner having been redesigned after so many years and with so many other technologies baked (CGLayer & CoreAnimation for example). AppKit would continue to exist for some time with developers having the option of mixing the two (as not all features will be available at the UIKit layer to start.) A good example of where UIKit bests AppKit is the seemingly simple "Put an animated progress meter in a table row". This is easy in UIKit because table cells are UIViews. However, in AppKit, a table cell is a NSCell which is -not- a view. On MacOS nearly everything has a NSView and a NSCell component (i.e. NSButton, NSButtonCell) On iOS there are no cells. (UIButton, no UIButtonCell.) Other AppKit classes will be implemented using their UIKit counterparts (NSView to UIView, NSWindow to UIWindow). The result will be a much cleaner development environment for applications that favors animation, multi-touch, and code reuse with the iOS platform.
robchez 16y ago
Just because they are obviously calling it "Lion" doesn't mean it wont be just another iterative update (Although it might not). Look at iTunes 10. They had the chance to do something huge with revision number 10 (like make it work on Windows!) but it was just another version of iTunes with a horrible icon and Ping!
cake 16y ago
What's the feature you expect the most in Lion ?
DeusExMachina 16y ago
A job posting from Apple a couple of months ago metioned a "revolutionary feature" that will "truly amaze everyone": http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/07/29/apple_seeks_engineer_for_revolutionary_new_mac_os_x_feature.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/07/29/apple_seeks_en... I really wonder what this feature could be.
ThomPete 16y ago
I am hoping that "Lion" will have a serious look at workflow integration. As apple have now made a consumer product (iPad) I hope that they will return with an OS more catered to professional need. Things such as creating workflow history is really something that have taken way to long to get around to.
jsz0 16y ago
What about OSX 10.7 for ARM? There are some impressive high end ARM SoCs in the pipeline. We know Apple isn't afraid of big architecture transitions. They've got a lot invested in ARM via PA Semi & Intrinsity. Sounds very plausible to me.
- protomyth 16y ago
  If there was a 64-bit version of ARM. I would believe it, but I am guessing not.
pilif 16y ago
I really hope OSX won't be the first release of OS X that only starts applications signed by Apple and bought in the Apple Desktop App Store (or whatever it's going to be called).
allwein 16y ago
TRIM. Even if that's the only new feature in 10.7, I'll be ponying my money up for it. I completely love the SSD in my MBP, but the occasional stuttering does get annoying at times.
plemer 16y ago
Techcrunch makes me wish I could bury stories.
dfj225 16y ago
> The computing world is shifting into the age of mobile, and iOS is now seen as Apple’s major operating system. Perhaps OS X Lion will represent the beginning of a unification between OS X and iOS. And if Apple is giving it the Lion moniker, which they won’t be able to top, perhaps they mean this to be last version of OS X? (Though they do say “next” version of Mac OS X and not “last”.) It seems that it would be fundamentally stupid for Apple to try and merge OS X and iOS. They are operating systems that target different types of devices with wildly methods of user interaction. Do people really see the iPhone and Mac being equivalent devices so soon? Or is this TechCrunch article just full of shit?
parka 16y ago
I wish they would include voice recognition for keyboard shortcuts or commands. There are so many occasions I wish it's there.

80 points by ssclafani 16y ago

jsz0 16y ago

Apple didn't put a mouse driven UI on a tablet. Why would they put a touch driven UI on a computer? Jobs has said he views PCs are trucks. Based on that statement I think 10.7 is more likely going to be about keeping the truck drivers happy.

wriq 16y ago
Well there is http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2010/08/the-mother-lode-welcome-to-the-imac-touch.html http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2010/08/the-moth... , which would add touch elements to iMac's.
- tjogin 16y ago
  Every Apple patent doesn't result in a shipped product or feature. This is Apple we're talking about; they love secrecy, don't want nobody to know what they're doing. Some of the patents they've filed are probably just ideas, some of them make it into products or features, and some are probably red herrings, meant just to throw their competition off.
easp 16y ago
Apple didn't put arrow keys on the first Mac either. A couple of years later, they did. You know why they waited? Because they wanted to make sure apps that were written to take advantage of the new UI, rather than ported from purely keyboard driven UIs. Why would they put a mouse UI on their first tablet, particularly when Microsoft has demonstrated what a mediocre result that gets you. I see no reason why, having established touch UI patterns on iOS devices, Apple would have any reason not to start introducing such things on the desktop. And really, have you been in a pickup lately? They have a lot of car like amenities, like antilock breaks, air conditioners, decent stereos, etc.
- enneff 16y ago
  Right, because it's _really_ ergonomic for me to reach out and touch my display.
  - megablast 16y ago
    Sometimes it is useful, very useful, most time it isn't. This does not mean it is a bad idea.
  - carbon8 16y ago
    Desktop touch functionality wouldn't necessarily be added to the primary display. Apple has filed patents for using touch screens for keyboards and trackpads. Even if it was for the primary display, apple has a patent for a movable display that is oriented horizontally when used as a touch screen. It's not clear how or whether would add desktop touch features, but they've clearly considered it.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    Touching your display is a horrible idea (I wonder how those new windows machines that do this are selling) [1], but the trackpad on the MBP is the thing that finally made me buy one. [1] Imagine working whole day having to hold your arms up to operate the mouse cursor. My arm hurts just thinking about it.

zdw 16y ago

I hope this is a sign that Apple is going to focus more on their desktop experience, if only because there aren't any new/hot/rumored devices to release. Apple also has it's own tick/tock of releases, between developer features and end user features - 10.4 and 10.6 being the former, and 10.5 being the latter. Thus, we're probably going to see a lot of new whiz-bang end user features in 10.7. "Unification" already exists - iOS and MacOS X core OS and kernel code is fairly similar, as is much of the userland API. It's different for obvious reasons (many to do with touch/hardware limitations), and unless those differences go away (which I don't see happening - touch on an iMac form factor = serious arm pain), I don't see much point to the talk of unification.

Zev 16y ago
Additionally, some big APIs from iOS have been (or look to be) available in both OS's. CoreLocation and AVFoundation, at the very least. And the multitouch framework on each OS is very similar, even if the prefix isn't. It wouldn't be too hard to abstract that away, if one needed to.
- DeusExMachina 16y ago
  I can add that the Mac API needs a little bit of polishing now. I just went back to develop a Mac application (for internal use) after developing on the iPhone, and certain things are not that intuitive or easy to use as on the iPhone. Is not really a big difference, but Mac API could use a little more consistency learned from the iPhone API.
sachinag 16y ago
There is a rumor of a substantially redesigned MacBook Air.
- easp 16y ago
  Which is probably as much driven by the fact that the air hasn't been updated in quite a while as it is by any facts. But who knows, it will be true at some point.

angstrom 16y ago

Or just a sudden switch to Thundercats character names to throw everyone off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ThunderCats_characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ThunderCats_characters

brisance 16y ago

My wild-ass guess is that Apple is going to let the apps from iOS run in a sandbox environment on OS X 10.7, which really shouldn't be that hard to do since development code runs on emulated iOS devices. This would broaden the reach of the iOS ecosystem.

thought_alarm 16y ago
> which really shouldn't be that hard to do since development code runs on emulated iOS devices. That's incorrect. Apps that run in the iOS Simulator are compiled to i386 code and run as a native OS X processes. They are essentially OS X apps that link to UIKit instead of AppKit. Edit: That's not to say Apple couldn't support such a scenario. Many App Store apps are already fat binaries that include ARMv6 and ARMv7 code. No reason why they couldn't include i386 code as well to facilitate running on Mac hardware.
- brisance 16y ago
  Yes, and the "not that hard" remark was in reference to their deep experience moving from 68K to PPC to x86. So, having fat binaries is not a foreign concept to them at all. Apple has filed a patent on OS-level advertising. http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/10/22/jobs-and-apple-seek-patent-on-operating-system-advertising/id=6761/ http://ipwatchdog.com/2009/10/22/jobs-and-apple-seek-patent-... Integrating iOS apps (where users are already conditioned to being exposed to advertising) with some version of OS X would not be a big leap from a technical or business strategy perspective.
Tamerlin 16y ago
I suspect that Apple's heading down the same road as XNA, because XNA enables a developer to build WPF applications that can run on Windows, XBox, and Zune; presumably also on the latest Windows Mobile as well. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if future versions, maybe even the upcoming release, set up an equivalent situation on the mac platform, now that Apple has a new TV device in addition to the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Heck, if Apple decided to be aggressive about getting into the living room and entertainment center, they could launch a box that's basically a souped up Apple TV with something close to an order of magnitude higher performance than an XBox 360 simply by building it around a Sandy Bridge, and have a significant contender in the gaming console market.

thought_alarm 16y ago

I'm hoping the next version of OS X will finally bring us true resolution independence, to correspond with some high DPI "Retina" MacBook displays. I also expect they'll provide new ways for developers and/or users to leverage both iOS and OS X; perhaps that's where cloud computing will come into play. Other than that, I don't think we're going to see any more huge innovations in desktop computing, from Apple or anyone else. All the action is in mobile (and development tools).

j_baker 16y ago
I can't help but think of "640k should be enough for everybody" when I read this. Desktop computing isn't as sexy as mobile computing, but it isn't dead yet. There are plenty of innovations left to be made.
- jseliger 16y ago
  This is fair, but I also think about an essay I read (from Kevin Kelly? It might be in his new books, _What Technology Wants_), in which he points out that, basically, we've hit a plateau of about 60 MPH landspeed for most journeys. If you chart a graph of "how fast people get around on land" from 1715 to about 1950, you see a steady rise. After that, you just see... us being steady. Ditto for air flight: from the dawn of aviation to about 1960 or 1970, you see steadily increasing speeds. Today, most planes still fly at about ~500 MPH (I think), just like they used to. Although there are still lots of micro-innovations going on with cars, rail, and planes, they've basically hit a maximum airspeed. I suspect something similar might be going on with the current paradigm of desktop operating systems. Since around ~2005 (when Windows XP's service packs finally caught up to virus / worm writers and OS X Tiger brought stability and full text search), nothing in operating systems has made a tangible difference in my life. Compared to the jump from DOS to Windows 95, or from 95/98 to XP, or the late versions of Mac OS to the early versions of OS X... the current changes in operating systems just aren't that great. Which isn't to say "consumer OSes are dead"—but they've probably hit a spot where the major problems have been solved. The innovations are smaller than universal protected memory, fast, full-indexed search, and the like. The key words above are "for this paradigm." Mobile represents the next obvious computing paradigm, and that might be a good thing. For better or worse, Microsoft has "won" the desktop and will probably never lose it. The company appears to mostly be competing with itself these days (I say, writing from an iMac).

dasil003 16y ago

The event isn't for another week. Are we going to be subjected to a steady stream of contentless speculation from the Apple pundit set for the next 7 days? I'm actually really excited for the announcement, but I couldn't care less what MG Siegler's opinion of it is.

gabrielroth 16y ago
The speculation should be pretty easy to avoid, if that's what you want to do.
- dasil003 16y ago
  Right, I'll be ok. This was just my attempt at discouraging people from upvoting the next 20 such articles without resorting to the this-isnt-hacker-news-please-sandblast-me meme.

zppx 16y ago

I was expecting the new release to be named Maine Coon or Cougar, jokes apart I hope some new improvements in Finder, file searching, some cool features for new hardware and a complete system compiled by clang. Maybe a bunch of small new software, I particulary would love a serious package manager, a interface to deal with launchctl and a working useradd that works with DirectoryService.

gamble 16y ago

Predictions: * 10.7 "Lion" (obviously) * iLife 2011 (with FaceTime in iChat), iWork 2011 * New Mac replacing MacBook Air with a swivelling touch screen * iOS app support on OSX, utilizing said touch screen

jeremymcanally 16y ago
This is purely made-up dreaming, but I hope your last point comes in the form of a Dashboard-like thing that lets you easily launch iOS apps. Pop it up and launch when needed, hide it when you don't.
- X-Istence 16y ago
  Personally I never use Dashboard, it was cool to play with for a couple of hours and after that the novelty wore off. It really hasn't seen any innovation at all, and overall feels out of place. If they put iOS support in Mac OS X that would be awesome, but I hope they do it in a way that they are just like other apps on my desktop that can be put in the dock. That way I am much more likely to use the apps.
  - cubicle67 16y ago
    I use it (dashboard) almost daily. most used app is a great javascript based calculator (can eval almost any js), and iStat for viewing processes FrontRow, on the other hand, I use rarely. When I do, I'm glad it's there though
    - gamble 16y ago
      I use it regularly as well, (calculator, calendar, weather, stocks, and iStat) but I agree with the previous poster than developer interest in dashboard widgets is pretty minimal these days. It would be great if I could run arbitrary iPhone apps in the dashboard alongside my widgets. I think it makes sense for Apple as well, since the value proposition for iOS to developers is shaping into an argument that, yes, there are a lot of Android phones out there, but there are a huge number of iPod Touches, iPads - and perhaps now Macs - in the hands of customers that can run the same iOS apps.

qq66 16y ago

Apple: "We ran out of cat names, let's use Lion." Press: "Apple is changing their OS architecture!"

aaronblohowiak 16y ago
You don't think Lions are cats?
- qq66 16y ago
  I meant, "ran out of cat names except Lion, which we were avoiding for precisely this reason" :)

bch 16y ago

How did this even end up on HN? It says nothing. Save your two minutes.

lovskogen 16y ago
Like most articles, I only read the HN comments, that's where the good stuff is – not in the articles themselves. For this kind of articles, anyway.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

newsfu 16y ago

The user interface elements in MacOS are supplied by AppKit, in iOS it's UIKit. What I expect to see is a marriage of the two with AppKit perhaps reimplemented with UIKit classes. Fracturing UIKit isn't unprecedented, it's already done on iOS with the iPad having widgets and features not available on iPhone. UIKit is cleaner having been redesigned after so many years and with so many other technologies baked (CGLayer & CoreAnimation for example). AppKit would continue to exist for some time with developers having the option of mixing the two (as not all features will be available at the UIKit layer to start.) A good example of where UIKit bests AppKit is the seemingly simple "Put an animated progress meter in a table row". This is easy in UIKit because table cells are UIViews. However, in AppKit, a table cell is a NSCell which is -not- a view. On MacOS nearly everything has a NSView and a NSCell component (i.e. NSButton, NSButtonCell) On iOS there are no cells. (UIButton, no UIButtonCell.) Other AppKit classes will be implemented using their UIKit counterparts (NSView to UIView, NSWindow to UIWindow). The result will be a much cleaner development environment for applications that favors animation, multi-touch, and code reuse with the iOS platform.

robchez 16y ago

Just because they are obviously calling it "Lion" doesn't mean it wont be just another iterative update (Although it might not). Look at iTunes 10. They had the chance to do something huge with revision number 10 (like make it work on Windows!) but it was just another version of iTunes with a horrible icon and Ping!

cake 16y ago

What's the feature you expect the most in Lion ?

DeusExMachina 16y ago

A job posting from Apple a couple of months ago metioned a "revolutionary feature" that will "truly amaze everyone": http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/07/29/apple_seeks_engineer_for_revolutionary_new_mac_os_x_feature.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/07/29/apple_seeks_en... I really wonder what this feature could be.

ThomPete 16y ago

I am hoping that "Lion" will have a serious look at workflow integration. As apple have now made a consumer product (iPad) I hope that they will return with an OS more catered to professional need. Things such as creating workflow history is really something that have taken way to long to get around to.

jsz0 16y ago

What about OSX 10.7 for ARM? There are some impressive high end ARM SoCs in the pipeline. We know Apple isn't afraid of big architecture transitions. They've got a lot invested in ARM via PA Semi & Intrinsity. Sounds very plausible to me.

protomyth 16y ago
If there was a 64-bit version of ARM. I would believe it, but I am guessing not.

pilif 16y ago

I really hope OSX won't be the first release of OS X that only starts applications signed by Apple and bought in the Apple Desktop App Store (or whatever it's going to be called).

allwein 16y ago

TRIM. Even if that's the only new feature in 10.7, I'll be ponying my money up for it. I completely love the SSD in my MBP, but the occasional stuttering does get annoying at times.

plemer 16y ago

Techcrunch makes me wish I could bury stories.

dfj225 16y ago

> The computing world is shifting into the age of mobile, and iOS is now seen as Apple’s major operating system. Perhaps OS X Lion will represent the beginning of a unification between OS X and iOS. And if Apple is giving it the Lion moniker, which they won’t be able to top, perhaps they mean this to be last version of OS X? (Though they do say “next” version of Mac OS X and not “last”.) It seems that it would be fundamentally stupid for Apple to try and merge OS X and iOS. They are operating systems that target different types of devices with wildly methods of user interaction. Do people really see the iPhone and Mac being equivalent devices so soon? Or is this TechCrunch article just full of shit?

parka 16y ago

I wish they would include voice recognition for keyboard shortcuts or commands. There are so many occasions I wish it's there.