OSX Lion - the new King in town

I have been a partial Mac user for about year, it was mostly a pleasant experience. I like the user interface, the simplicity, attention to details, the obvious and simple things that make your life easier, which Mac offers. I do have Windows 7 available through boot-camp or through parallels desktop, just to use Office, games and some other apps that I need for my university.


Now from Snow Leopard I went and got the new Lion.


Here are my first impressions.


Well, it is a Mac still, not many changes so far, just a few little additions here and there, but all are welcomed.


So what first, the new "Mission Control" and Fullscreen apps.


We had some fullscreen apps before, just take Aperture for example:

It was fullscreen app from the beginning, now this support is native and any app can take advantage. This gives a great new experience to reading PDF documents. Here is a windowed document:

And here is document in fullscreen:

Now when there are multiple fullscreen apps at the same time, it is very easy to switch between them, this is where "Mission Control" comes. Take a look at typical desktop mess:

Now with a single gesture on touchpad, all the documents are arranged (fullscreen apps on the top) windowed apps on the center. Just click the program and it will be selected. Easy.

There are some minor visual changes also. The new profile menu:

"About this mac" is also updated:

And interesting status report, about the disk usage:

I also like the new Finder changes. It shows a list of all the recently used documents, based on their type "picture", "music", "video", etc, great addition!

Another cool feature, that was added, is the ability to send files, between to Mac computers. It is as simple as drag & drop - "AirDrop":

No need to use flash USB drives, bluetooth, network servers, just have 2 Macs nearby and it works automatically!

Another major features, that I haven't tried as much, is the addition of versions.

Usually when you work on document, you constantly "Save" you work, so that if something bad might happen, you won't loose your work=, but guess what, Mac does this automatically for you, and it also stores different versions of your document, so you can go back, and undo any work you did before. Awesome ! Let's take a look, I created a simple text document "Version1":

I make a few changes...

And then my version is ready.

But hey, I think I liked the first version more, so I go back in time....

And select the version that I want.

I think this is the most impressive addition to any OS, in a long time. I am impressed, but let's see how it would work in the real life.

So far the Lion is amazing, it is a strong step forward for the OS, I am happy with it and enjoy using it.