Not so long ago, Steve Jobs announced the beginning of the "World after PC", pointing to the upcoming ubiquity of smart phones and other gadgets, which in the near future will displace PCs. And while the iPhone and iPad acquire the status of the single and uniquedevices, the question remains: what will happen to the PC in the era of mobile devices? And here the conversation will go just about OS like Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which has recently become available to users. So, welcome to the new world, ladies and gentlemen.
In their usual pompous manner, Apple has announced OS Lion as “the most advanced operating system in the world" that is proved out a presence of more than 250 new features. But the main their featureis a huge impact of iOS: Apple unite iOS and Mac OS X so far that while working with Lion we can gain the impression that we are in front of an iPad with the keyboard.
Unlike previous versions of Mac OS X - 10.6 Snow Leopard, which hasn’t a large number of user-visible changes, the difference of 10.7 is bound by most direct impact of innovations in the user interface. However, despite the fact that the new operating system contains a lot of nice innovations, it’s impossible to say that the Lion is something of radically new.
The price is attractive to buy it - like Snow Leopard at the time, it costs 29$. However, in some way OS X Lion was marred by problems with the payment: due to unclear errors, the payment wasn’t counted immediately, but by clicking the "Buy" button again, your account lose easier for another 29$. The record for multiple purchase of Apple OS is 122 copies for an amount of payment of about 4,000$. First, Apple and PayPal refused to take responsibility, but now Apple has begun to notify customers that incorrectly debited funds will soon be returned to their accounts.
The process of installing of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is strikingly simple: after the download from the Mac App Store it appears the icon :Install Mac OS X Lion", which starts the installation with one click. The button "Next"- and the computer restarts and begins to misuse the OS update, which takes about 30 minutes. This process does not require your participation, so you can safely take a break for tea:).
As for the requirements, Mac OS X Lion needs a Core 2 Duo processor and a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, so that users of first Macbooks were "overboard" progress. Furthermore, disappeared some utilities allowing run PPC-applications on a PC with processor Intel.
The first thing in the interface, that catches your eye after the loading, is inverted scrolling, which is probably justified in touch screens, than in the input devices. However, this feature can be easily disabled in the settings. Everywhere there is a tendency of Apple to maximize the use of workspace: disappearing scroll bar, notices a rectangular shape, full-screen applications. However, some changes affect adversely on the usability of the operating system. For example, in previous versions active and inactive buttons considerably differed in color. In Mac OS X Lion the same degree of contrast between them was almost unnoticeable. On the other hand, despite the tendency of an overall minimalism of the system, some applications are justified of mindless embellishments (such as address book in the form of a notebook, and iCal in the form of a tear-off calendar).
The system of Autosave is very usable. Even an experienced user can, at best, lose time to recover the information, and at worst to lose the information itself. Mac OS X Lion with features such as automatic saving and creating new versions of documents, gives the possibility to "rollback" to earlier saved versions of a document.
In addition, applications in Lion are able to open the documents you've worked the last time. And a lot of other pleasant trifles. However, it is worth noting that Mac OS X Lion - the most significant update of Mac OS X over the past 5 years. Only in the first 24 hours after the start, users downloaded one million copies. That means about 695 new copies per minute. That is, every second “Lion” appears on 11 computers.