18 ms·

New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

102 points by pclark 16y ago

goalieca 16y ago
Is there any news on the invisible parts of Lion? Snow Leopard brought us OpenCL, Clang, Grand Central, and these other cool technologies. Will we finally have resolution independent displays??
- Synaesthesia 16y ago
  Resolution independence - IMO that's never gonna happen. Apple will do the pixel-doubling thing, I reckon. Netkas has confirmed the following about Lion: (http://netkas.org/?p=609 http://netkas.org/?p=609) >Lion requires hardware with a Core 2 Duo processor or better. A lot of apps are sandboxed. OpenGL 3.2 support
  - lurch_mojoff 16y ago
    OpenGL 3.2, huh? Well, I guess it's better than nothing, but had a faint hope Apple will skip ahead to 4.0 or even 4.1. Next time around it seems.
    - masklinn 16y ago
      Intel's HD 3000 seems to only support OpenGL 3. NVidia's 320M and 330M are likewise limited to OpenGL 3.3 (according to wikipedia, NVidia's own spec pages only talks about 2.1[0]). I'm not sure it makes as much sense to support that. [0] http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_330m_us.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_330m_us.html
      - zdw 16y ago
        Apple has used LLVM in the past to run more advanced OpenGL implementations on lesser hardware - their Intel 950 graphic driver was one example of this: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/006492.html http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/00649... Of course, this only covered vertex processing and other compute-intensive tasks, and thus wouldn't apply to many other OpenGL features.
  - terhechte 16y ago
    Which is weird, because resolution independence has been part of Mac OS X since 10.5. Only if developer tools are installed though, and it never really worked with Carbon applications, but those are slowly vanishing anyway. I just activated it again to see how it looks and.. well, it could look better :) I tried the preferences and I've to admit I think they looked better (scaled up) in 10.5 than on 10.6.
  - snsr 16y ago
    You reckon correcly; Lion apparently has support for 'HiDPI' mode, which is essentially pixel doubling. http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/mac-os-x-lion-building-in-support-for-super-high-resolution-retina-monitors/ http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/mac-os-x-lion-building-i...
- CognitiveLens 16y ago
  I haven't seen it mentioned, but if anyone gets official word about TRIM support, please let me know.
  - danudey 16y ago
    It's been suggested that OS X might not actually need TRIM support (for reasons not entirely understood): http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-performance-trim-in-osx/7 http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-pe...
  - count 16y ago
    TRIM hasn't been necessary in years, and definitely not with modern SSDs. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1092456 http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1092456
- othermaciej 16y ago
  Safari is multi-process now, and Web pages run sandboxed by the OS. Does that count as an invisible part of Lion?
qjz 16y ago
Note that what they refer to as "Versions" isn't really version control. It would more accurately be referred to as snapshots, as it simply performs a backup when opening a document, then an hourly backup while it's open. This is a bit to arbitrary to be considered version control. Nonetheless, it might be useful to undisciplined users, if the snapshots are easy to access and the feature isn't well hidden. Also note that apps must be updated for Lion in order to take advantage of the feature.
- kaylarose 16y ago
  It may not be 'real' version control, but remember that huge percentage of people have no idea that such a thing even exists. If you've ever explained version control to a non-developer the second they actually grok what it is, they instantly see the value. This seems like a great way to introduce your average user to the powers of version control.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    Hopefully it works better than XCode snapshots
- ugh 16y ago
  It might be the case that simply saving the document creates a new version. Not exactly version control but quite good compared to nothing. Apple tends to omit details like that.
  - inaequitas 16y ago
    The guidelines say that apps should auto-save their documents on Lion, and you can bet Apple'sown productivity suite will. So snapshotting every 2 seconds might not work out too well.
    - ugh 16y ago
      I was obviously referring to saving manually. If that’s no longer possible they could just replace the the save command in the menu with a “Create Version” command and Command+S could create a version instead of saving.
icefox 16y ago
Yah it only took OS X what.. some 13 years to get what KDE has had with "Resume". Year after year I pondered why other desktops didn't implement this. A pretty basic and killer feature that is hard to let go once you have it.
- melling 16y ago
  Faulting Apple for having different priorities about which features to implement first? I used to use a a Linux (Fedora) laptop but I got tired of opening the lid, only to find out that it didn't suspend properly. I bought a Mac so I could run Unix and have the basic stuff "just work." I'm still hopeful that someday the Linux community will finally produce a polished desktop solution on par with Apple.
  - icefox 16y ago
    Same here, when I discovered that OS X was solid enough that I rarely rebooted combined with suspend that always works the requirement to re-launch on boot like KDE went down for me. It is still a cool feature.
- code_duck 16y ago
  I think it's more than just saving which programs are open in a session - based on the line "In fact, whenever you quit and relaunch an app, Resume opens it precisely the way you left it.", it's also saving program state a la iOS.
eggbrain 16y ago
Resume is something I've wanted from an operating system for a long time. Nothing is more frustrating than leaving your computer for an hour, only to come back and realize updates demanded that they restart your computer and you need to relaunch all your applications, videos, etc.
- nathos 16y ago
  I 'verun into this on Windows XP, but never on Mac OS X. Actually, I don't think Windows 7 forces reboots either, it just installs updates when you shut down or restart.
  - paxswill 16y ago
    I have had 7 force reboots before (usually while I'm in game), but there is an option to disable that 'feature'.
  - overcyn 16y ago
    OS X definitely starts to nag if you dont update in awhile.
    - nathos 16y ago
      …but it doesn't install updates and restart your computer without permission.
      - chc 16y ago
        Unless I'm misremembering, unless you ask for detailed information about the updates, it doesn't tell you ahead of time if it's going to ask to restart your computer. It just says basically, "There are updates available. Do you want them?"
        catch23 16y ago
        you're probably misremembering -- there's a little arrow next to the update items which require a reboot, and even after installing everything, you can still choose to reboot later. I still have a system running Tiger so I don't think it's changed since then.
FiddlerClamp 16y ago
Versions and Resume look cool, but Launchpad? Do people really need a full view of all the (dozens) of apps they have installed? I thought we were getting away from that with Quicksilver and other 'find as you type' tools. Launchpad seems like Program Manager from the olden days of Windows.
- yan 16y ago
  By "we" do you mean the geeks that read HN and write code, or their typical consumer? I have never seen my mom type to find a file she was looking for, let alone launch an app. Every single person I know that isn't in technology or consider themselves technically competent uses and explores their computer solely with the mouse. Even editing a word she just typed, my mom would leave the keyboard, mouse over the previous word's characters, and then retype it.
  - joedavis512 16y ago
    At least it's better than pressing backspace until she gets to the word and then typing the whole thing again. ;)
    - billybob 16y ago
      If you type pretty quickly, that can actually be faster than using the mouse.
  - wglb 16y ago
    Well, my Mom likes WordPerfect. Version 5 in which there is no mouse. She is a master of the reveal codes. (Not to get into a your mom vs my mom or anything)
- rsl7 16y ago
  Although you can always open /Applications, you can also litter your HD with apps. But now with the App Store you don't even have to know where the app is at all when it just appears in your dock or now in Launchpad. I hope it at least supports drag and drop like cmd-tab. I'd use it. Typing app names is great and all, but I don't manage my photos with the command line.
sandwiches 16y ago
Full screen apps! I've been waiting for this since the DOS days.
kstenerud 16y ago
I sure hope the auto-save "feature" can be disabled...
- inaequitas 16y ago
  It's up to apps to implement it. But why, do you honestly think it will get in the way anywhere besides IDEs (and maybe not even there...)? This is an honest question because I can't really think of instances where I wouldn't want something like this. I'm spoiled by Notational Velocity, which saves automatically, and by iPad apps for same. I have Coda and TextMate set to save when they lose focus so I don't lose work...
  - chc 16y ago
    Some people actually do use a large percentage of their hard drives.
    - cryptoz 16y ago
      Those people are exceedingly rare. And I'm sure applications won't autosave huge files; if they do there would be large performance hits. Most files that need autosaving are basic documents, maybe pictures. 99.9% of the time autosaving is a good idea. If your autosave makes you run out of disk space, you're probably "doing it wrong".
      - chc 16y ago
        It seems pretty small-minded to blame the user for "doing it wrong" because an application used up all his hard drive space with no way to disable it. What would "doing it right" consist of? Just not using the application at all?
        tesseract 16y ago
        I suspect "you" in the last sentence was meant to refer to the application developer.
zdw 16y ago
Both of these require the application to specifically support them (per the asterisk after the features). I'm assuming they'll be supported by Apple's first party programs, then sporadically by 3rd party developers, as it is with Time Machine, QuickView and Spotlight document helpers support.
dstorrs 16y ago
The primary focus here (understandably) is "we make your laptop look / work like your iPad". Versions, AirDrop, etc are tacked on at the end and given much less focus. The problem with making my laptop work like an iPad is that the laptop is a general purpose computer and the iPad is not.[1] The genius of the iPad was that it was a specialized device built for a single purpose: consuming media anywhere, anytime. It has long battery life, sunlight-visible screen, and does not require mouse or keyboard. It is very good at its purpose -- you can use it as a book reader or movie viewer while riding a bus, sitting in a park, etc -- and it sucks for anything else (e.g. anything that requires typing more than a few characters). My laptop, on the other hand, was designed to be an all-up computer that could be used anywhere that there was a flat surface, but mostly indoors. I can use it at home, at the coffee shop, etc. It's also fine for consuming media as long as I'm not in direct sunlight or away from power for more than a few hours. So. What exactly am I gaining by adding these iPad features? Sure, I bet they're handy and I'll probably learn to use them. But I can't help but think that a bunch of guys as talented as Apple could have produced something really impressive in the time they took adding these iPad features. [1] No pedantry, please.
- __david__ 16y ago
  Well, I think the ipad style of app is intriguing--they differ from a current desktop app in a few significant ways: 1. There's no notion of save. 2. There's no notion of quit. 3. There's no notion of filesystem. Those are all interesting tweaks. Having the app save things automatically and always present you with the most up-to-date version of your document is kind of cool actually. But, you say, "I don't want it to save my document sometimes--what if I want to experiment and then throw away the changes?" I think that is where the new "versions" feature fits in. It seems designed to give people exactly that. I suspect that ⌘S will change from "Save" to "Snapshot". Having the app suspend itself, save its state and unload at the appropriate time is interesting too. It gives the app a sense of persistence that doesn't exist in most desktop apps currently. I've already subconsciously switched to this style of thinking. I like my Firefox set up to restore the windows from last time. I do a similar thing with my Emacs so that all my buffers get saved and restored (emacs-desktop). I think I'd have a hard time letting go of my filesystem. I don't see anything in Lion that seems to indicate they are moving that way. But I kind of understand it. It'll probably start moving that direction eventually. But who knows.
pkamb 16y ago
I'm scared of what they'll do to Exposé in Lion... they already butchered it with the grid style in 10.6, but at least that could be undone with an easy little hack: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869611 http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869611
- astrange 16y ago
  Installing beta versions of Dock.app is highly not recommended for system stability.
  - pkamb 16y ago
    It's fine. Using Snow Leopard's version of Expose is highly not recommended for mental stability.
pkamb 16y ago
A long-time Windows advantage is finally being added: windows can be resized from all edges and corners.
- code_duck 16y ago
  That's also present on countless window managers for X11 (Linux, BSD). What both Macs and Windows seem to lack is a modifier for holding to drag windows: most X11 window managers let you hold Alt to drag windows, regardless of where you click. That would have saved me from several situations in Windows where the titlebar of a window is out of the viewable area, and I therefore could not move the window.
hallmark 16y ago
The official marketing message is bring the "magic of iPad" to the desktop. Apple knows how to ride their own wave. The glossy pictures give Grandma the impression that the UIs will merge and everything will be better because of the new interface changes. The substance behind this hype are the improvements toward ubiquitous computing. No single improvement is revolutionary. Auto Save and Versions means less worry about losing work. Google Spreadsheets has these. Resume is similar to Session Manager for Firefox. It is useful for single computers now, but will be even more handy when we move around between computers and resume from anywhere. AirDrop and even iPad File Sharing over WebDAV on Lion Server are efforts to integrate services like Dropbox into the core of the OS. Management of these menial tasks and concerns fades to the background. Google is artful in bringing such improvements to their web apps, and Apple is beautifully skilled at integrating new functionality and paradigms into their devices and OS platforms. So we have saving, versioning (of sorts), resuming, and sharing. All we need is a humongous data center to store all the data. The writing is on the wall, just past the glossy pictures.
natep 16y ago
Wow. My next computer might be a mac... The auto-versioning got me thinking of how to do this with git. You could have a cron job come by while you're working and if anything has changed, add and commit it to $CURR_BRANCH/auto. Then, when you're ready to do a real commit, you `git merge --squash` I know that real git users commit about as often as they save, but would this make sense as a workflow for those of us who are still used to committing only when it works? Or would all of the autocommits make things overcomplicated?
calloc 16y ago
I found this interesting, apparently Dino A. Dai Zovi (http://twitter.com/dinodaizovi http://twitter.com/dinodaizovi) and Stefan Esser (http://twitter.com/i0n1c http://twitter.com/i0n1c), two security researchers (hackers) have apparently received invitations to try out Mac OS X Lion with some strings attached that they can't talk about the as of yet unreleased OS: https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40903620438269952 https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40903620438269952 https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/40905883584180224 https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/40905883584180224 Question related to this: https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906705118175233 https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906705118175233 https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906796650471424 https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906796650471424 https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40909480342331392 https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40909480342331392 If indeed Apple is moving forward and opening up dialogue with external researchers this is a good thing. Hopefully that means that Mac OS X Lion will finally join the ranks of Windows 7 and Linux in having full ASLR available and more sand-boxing of the various components so that it becomes a much more hardened target.
- X-Istence 16y ago
  Ha, that's me asking those questions! Yeah, I was honestly really surprised as well that Apple is doing an outreach, it definitely makes me extremely happy to see that Apple may finally be getting it concerning security!
jpadilla 16y ago
I'm actually excited about this. Version Control at application levels instead of system wide like Time Machine, could be pretty useful to regular users. Don't know about the autosave really. I guess its one thing less to really "care"about...
gcr 16y ago
So this version has: - an ubuntu netbook remix clone (OMG A SCREEN FULL OF ICONS!) but with even more blur, - built-in F11 key - Compiz ring switching plugin - a trackpad, but rebranded! - automatic saving, but rebranded! - time machine, but rebranded! - "suspend" instead of "shut down", but rebranded! - thunderbird's default email layout - gmail's threads, but rebranded! - ripoff of giver (a Novell engineer's 2007 hack day project, see http://code.google.com/p/giver/ http://code.google.com/p/giver/ ) - ripoff of LUKS - a "server" control panel program Why do people pay for this?
- wriq 16y ago
  "Why do people pay for this?" Cause the implementation of a feature is more important than the feature itself. Apple rarely comes up with new tech on its own. They rebrand existing tech and work on the experience to create a product and a platform. Seriously, who in the general public knows what LUKS is?
- foobarbazetc 16y ago
  Because it just works.
- code_duck 16y ago
  Mac OS itself is great. I don't mind paying for a version as part of a new machine. The update, though, isn't necessarily exciting enough to me to pay for.
- kentosi 16y ago
  > Why do people pay for this? So that you don't have to bother installing each of these items separately. No downloading, config files, drivers, etc. It's all just there.

102 points by pclark 16y ago

Is there any news on the invisible parts of Lion? Snow Leopard brought us OpenCL, Clang, Grand Central, and these other cool technologies. Will we finally have resolution independent displays??

Synaesthesia 16y ago
Resolution independence - IMO that's never gonna happen. Apple will do the pixel-doubling thing, I reckon. Netkas has confirmed the following about Lion: (http://netkas.org/?p=609 http://netkas.org/?p=609) >Lion requires hardware with a Core 2 Duo processor or better. A lot of apps are sandboxed. OpenGL 3.2 support
- lurch_mojoff 16y ago
  OpenGL 3.2, huh? Well, I guess it's better than nothing, but had a faint hope Apple will skip ahead to 4.0 or even 4.1. Next time around it seems.
  - masklinn 16y ago
    Intel's HD 3000 seems to only support OpenGL 3. NVidia's 320M and 330M are likewise limited to OpenGL 3.3 (according to wikipedia, NVidia's own spec pages only talks about 2.1[0]). I'm not sure it makes as much sense to support that. [0] http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_330m_us.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_330m_us.html
    - zdw 16y ago
      Apple has used LLVM in the past to run more advanced OpenGL implementations on lesser hardware - their Intel 950 graphic driver was one example of this: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/006492.html http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/00649... Of course, this only covered vertex processing and other compute-intensive tasks, and thus wouldn't apply to many other OpenGL features.
- terhechte 16y ago
  Which is weird, because resolution independence has been part of Mac OS X since 10.5. Only if developer tools are installed though, and it never really worked with Carbon applications, but those are slowly vanishing anyway. I just activated it again to see how it looks and.. well, it could look better :) I tried the preferences and I've to admit I think they looked better (scaled up) in 10.5 than on 10.6.
- snsr 16y ago
  You reckon correcly; Lion apparently has support for 'HiDPI' mode, which is essentially pixel doubling. http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/mac-os-x-lion-building-in-support-for-super-high-resolution-retina-monitors/ http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/mac-os-x-lion-building-i...
CognitiveLens 16y ago
I haven't seen it mentioned, but if anyone gets official word about TRIM support, please let me know.
- danudey 16y ago
  It's been suggested that OS X might not actually need TRIM support (for reasons not entirely understood): http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-performance-trim-in-osx/7 http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-pe...
- count 16y ago
  TRIM hasn't been necessary in years, and definitely not with modern SSDs. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1092456 http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1092456
othermaciej 16y ago
Safari is multi-process now, and Web pages run sandboxed by the OS. Does that count as an invisible part of Lion?

qjz 16y ago

Note that what they refer to as "Versions" isn't really version control. It would more accurately be referred to as snapshots, as it simply performs a backup when opening a document, then an hourly backup while it's open. This is a bit to arbitrary to be considered version control. Nonetheless, it might be useful to undisciplined users, if the snapshots are easy to access and the feature isn't well hidden. Also note that apps must be updated for Lion in order to take advantage of the feature.

kaylarose 16y ago
It may not be 'real' version control, but remember that huge percentage of people have no idea that such a thing even exists. If you've ever explained version control to a non-developer the second they actually grok what it is, they instantly see the value. This seems like a great way to introduce your average user to the powers of version control.
- gte910h 16y ago
  Hopefully it works better than XCode snapshots
ugh 16y ago
It might be the case that simply saving the document creates a new version. Not exactly version control but quite good compared to nothing. Apple tends to omit details like that.
- inaequitas 16y ago
  The guidelines say that apps should auto-save their documents on Lion, and you can bet Apple'sown productivity suite will. So snapshotting every 2 seconds might not work out too well.
  - ugh 16y ago
    I was obviously referring to saving manually. If that’s no longer possible they could just replace the the save command in the menu with a “Create Version” command and Command+S could create a version instead of saving.

icefox 16y ago

Yah it only took OS X what.. some 13 years to get what KDE has had with "Resume". Year after year I pondered why other desktops didn't implement this. A pretty basic and killer feature that is hard to let go once you have it.

melling 16y ago
Faulting Apple for having different priorities about which features to implement first? I used to use a a Linux (Fedora) laptop but I got tired of opening the lid, only to find out that it didn't suspend properly. I bought a Mac so I could run Unix and have the basic stuff "just work." I'm still hopeful that someday the Linux community will finally produce a polished desktop solution on par with Apple.
- icefox 16y ago
  Same here, when I discovered that OS X was solid enough that I rarely rebooted combined with suspend that always works the requirement to re-launch on boot like KDE went down for me. It is still a cool feature.
code_duck 16y ago
I think it's more than just saving which programs are open in a session - based on the line "In fact, whenever you quit and relaunch an app, Resume opens it precisely the way you left it.", it's also saving program state a la iOS.

eggbrain 16y ago

Resume is something I've wanted from an operating system for a long time. Nothing is more frustrating than leaving your computer for an hour, only to come back and realize updates demanded that they restart your computer and you need to relaunch all your applications, videos, etc.

nathos 16y ago
I 'verun into this on Windows XP, but never on Mac OS X. Actually, I don't think Windows 7 forces reboots either, it just installs updates when you shut down or restart.
- paxswill 16y ago
  I have had 7 force reboots before (usually while I'm in game), but there is an option to disable that 'feature'.
- overcyn 16y ago
  OS X definitely starts to nag if you dont update in awhile.
  - nathos 16y ago
    …but it doesn't install updates and restart your computer without permission.
    - chc 16y ago
      Unless I'm misremembering, unless you ask for detailed information about the updates, it doesn't tell you ahead of time if it's going to ask to restart your computer. It just says basically, "There are updates available. Do you want them?"
      - catch23 16y ago
        you're probably misremembering -- there's a little arrow next to the update items which require a reboot, and even after installing everything, you can still choose to reboot later. I still have a system running Tiger so I don't think it's changed since then.

FiddlerClamp 16y ago

Versions and Resume look cool, but Launchpad? Do people really need a full view of all the (dozens) of apps they have installed? I thought we were getting away from that with Quicksilver and other 'find as you type' tools. Launchpad seems like Program Manager from the olden days of Windows.

yan 16y ago
By "we" do you mean the geeks that read HN and write code, or their typical consumer? I have never seen my mom type to find a file she was looking for, let alone launch an app. Every single person I know that isn't in technology or consider themselves technically competent uses and explores their computer solely with the mouse. Even editing a word she just typed, my mom would leave the keyboard, mouse over the previous word's characters, and then retype it.
- joedavis512 16y ago
  At least it's better than pressing backspace until she gets to the word and then typing the whole thing again. ;)
  - billybob 16y ago
    If you type pretty quickly, that can actually be faster than using the mouse.
- wglb 16y ago
  Well, my Mom likes WordPerfect. Version 5 in which there is no mouse. She is a master of the reveal codes. (Not to get into a your mom vs my mom or anything)
rsl7 16y ago
Although you can always open /Applications, you can also litter your HD with apps. But now with the App Store you don't even have to know where the app is at all when it just appears in your dock or now in Launchpad. I hope it at least supports drag and drop like cmd-tab. I'd use it. Typing app names is great and all, but I don't manage my photos with the command line.

sandwiches 16y ago

Full screen apps! I've been waiting for this since the DOS days.

kstenerud 16y ago

I sure hope the auto-save "feature" can be disabled...

inaequitas 16y ago
It's up to apps to implement it. But why, do you honestly think it will get in the way anywhere besides IDEs (and maybe not even there...)? This is an honest question because I can't really think of instances where I wouldn't want something like this. I'm spoiled by Notational Velocity, which saves automatically, and by iPad apps for same. I have Coda and TextMate set to save when they lose focus so I don't lose work...
- chc 16y ago
  Some people actually do use a large percentage of their hard drives.
  - cryptoz 16y ago
    Those people are exceedingly rare. And I'm sure applications won't autosave huge files; if they do there would be large performance hits. Most files that need autosaving are basic documents, maybe pictures. 99.9% of the time autosaving is a good idea. If your autosave makes you run out of disk space, you're probably "doing it wrong".
    - chc 16y ago
      It seems pretty small-minded to blame the user for "doing it wrong" because an application used up all his hard drive space with no way to disable it. What would "doing it right" consist of? Just not using the application at all?
      - tesseract 16y ago
        I suspect "you" in the last sentence was meant to refer to the application developer.

zdw 16y ago

Both of these require the application to specifically support them (per the asterisk after the features). I'm assuming they'll be supported by Apple's first party programs, then sporadically by 3rd party developers, as it is with Time Machine, QuickView and Spotlight document helpers support.

dstorrs 16y ago

The primary focus here (understandably) is "we make your laptop look / work like your iPad". Versions, AirDrop, etc are tacked on at the end and given much less focus. The problem with making my laptop work like an iPad is that the laptop is a general purpose computer and the iPad is not.[1] The genius of the iPad was that it was a specialized device built for a single purpose: consuming media anywhere, anytime. It has long battery life, sunlight-visible screen, and does not require mouse or keyboard. It is very good at its purpose -- you can use it as a book reader or movie viewer while riding a bus, sitting in a park, etc -- and it sucks for anything else (e.g. anything that requires typing more than a few characters). My laptop, on the other hand, was designed to be an all-up computer that could be used anywhere that there was a flat surface, but mostly indoors. I can use it at home, at the coffee shop, etc. It's also fine for consuming media as long as I'm not in direct sunlight or away from power for more than a few hours. So. What exactly am I gaining by adding these iPad features? Sure, I bet they're handy and I'll probably learn to use them. But I can't help but think that a bunch of guys as talented as Apple could have produced something really impressive in the time they took adding these iPad features. [1] No pedantry, please.

__david__ 16y ago
Well, I think the ipad style of app is intriguing--they differ from a current desktop app in a few significant ways: 1. There's no notion of save. 2. There's no notion of quit. 3. There's no notion of filesystem. Those are all interesting tweaks. Having the app save things automatically and always present you with the most up-to-date version of your document is kind of cool actually. But, you say, "I don't want it to save my document sometimes--what if I want to experiment and then throw away the changes?" I think that is where the new "versions" feature fits in. It seems designed to give people exactly that. I suspect that ⌘S will change from "Save" to "Snapshot". Having the app suspend itself, save its state and unload at the appropriate time is interesting too. It gives the app a sense of persistence that doesn't exist in most desktop apps currently. I've already subconsciously switched to this style of thinking. I like my Firefox set up to restore the windows from last time. I do a similar thing with my Emacs so that all my buffers get saved and restored (emacs-desktop). I think I'd have a hard time letting go of my filesystem. I don't see anything in Lion that seems to indicate they are moving that way. But I kind of understand it. It'll probably start moving that direction eventually. But who knows.

pkamb 16y ago

I'm scared of what they'll do to Exposé in Lion... they already butchered it with the grid style in 10.6, but at least that could be undone with an easy little hack: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869611 http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869611

astrange 16y ago
Installing beta versions of Dock.app is highly not recommended for system stability.
- pkamb 16y ago
  It's fine. Using Snow Leopard's version of Expose is highly not recommended for mental stability.

pkamb 16y ago

A long-time Windows advantage is finally being added: windows can be resized from all edges and corners.

code_duck 16y ago
That's also present on countless window managers for X11 (Linux, BSD). What both Macs and Windows seem to lack is a modifier for holding to drag windows: most X11 window managers let you hold Alt to drag windows, regardless of where you click. That would have saved me from several situations in Windows where the titlebar of a window is out of the viewable area, and I therefore could not move the window.

hallmark 16y ago

The official marketing message is bring the "magic of iPad" to the desktop. Apple knows how to ride their own wave. The glossy pictures give Grandma the impression that the UIs will merge and everything will be better because of the new interface changes. The substance behind this hype are the improvements toward ubiquitous computing. No single improvement is revolutionary. Auto Save and Versions means less worry about losing work. Google Spreadsheets has these. Resume is similar to Session Manager for Firefox. It is useful for single computers now, but will be even more handy when we move around between computers and resume from anywhere. AirDrop and even iPad File Sharing over WebDAV on Lion Server are efforts to integrate services like Dropbox into the core of the OS. Management of these menial tasks and concerns fades to the background. Google is artful in bringing such improvements to their web apps, and Apple is beautifully skilled at integrating new functionality and paradigms into their devices and OS platforms. So we have saving, versioning (of sorts), resuming, and sharing. All we need is a humongous data center to store all the data. The writing is on the wall, just past the glossy pictures.

natep 16y ago

Wow. My next computer might be a mac... The auto-versioning got me thinking of how to do this with git. You could have a cron job come by while you're working and if anything has changed, add and commit it to $CURR_BRANCH/auto. Then, when you're ready to do a real commit, you `git merge --squash` I know that real git users commit about as often as they save, but would this make sense as a workflow for those of us who are still used to committing only when it works? Or would all of the autocommits make things overcomplicated?

calloc 16y ago

I found this interesting, apparently Dino A. Dai Zovi (http://twitter.com/dinodaizovi http://twitter.com/dinodaizovi) and Stefan Esser (http://twitter.com/i0n1c http://twitter.com/i0n1c), two security researchers (hackers) have apparently received invitations to try out Mac OS X Lion with some strings attached that they can't talk about the as of yet unreleased OS: https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40903620438269952 https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40903620438269952 https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/40905883584180224 https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/40905883584180224 Question related to this: https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906705118175233 https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906705118175233 https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906796650471424 https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906796650471424 https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40909480342331392 https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40909480342331392 If indeed Apple is moving forward and opening up dialogue with external researchers this is a good thing. Hopefully that means that Mac OS X Lion will finally join the ranks of Windows 7 and Linux in having full ASLR available and more sand-boxing of the various components so that it becomes a much more hardened target.

X-Istence 16y ago
Ha, that's me asking those questions! Yeah, I was honestly really surprised as well that Apple is doing an outreach, it definitely makes me extremely happy to see that Apple may finally be getting it concerning security!

jpadilla 16y ago

I'm actually excited about this. Version Control at application levels instead of system wide like Time Machine, could be pretty useful to regular users. Don't know about the autosave really. I guess its one thing less to really "care"about...

gcr 16y ago

So this version has: - an ubuntu netbook remix clone (OMG A SCREEN FULL OF ICONS!) but with even more blur, - built-in F11 key - Compiz ring switching plugin - a trackpad, but rebranded! - automatic saving, but rebranded! - time machine, but rebranded! - "suspend" instead of "shut down", but rebranded! - thunderbird's default email layout - gmail's threads, but rebranded! - ripoff of giver (a Novell engineer's 2007 hack day project, see http://code.google.com/p/giver/ http://code.google.com/p/giver/ ) - ripoff of LUKS - a "server" control panel program Why do people pay for this?

wriq 16y ago
"Why do people pay for this?" Cause the implementation of a feature is more important than the feature itself. Apple rarely comes up with new tech on its own. They rebrand existing tech and work on the experience to create a product and a platform. Seriously, who in the general public knows what LUKS is?
foobarbazetc 16y ago
Because it just works.
code_duck 16y ago
Mac OS itself is great. I don't mind paying for a version as part of a new machine. The update, though, isn't necessarily exciting enough to me to pay for.
kentosi 16y ago
> Why do people pay for this? So that you don't have to bother installing each of these items separately. No downloading, config files, drivers, etc. It's all just there.