Thus happened the Epic keynote, and thus came the big announcement. The whole of Moscone Centre was awestruck for about a couple of hours. Of course everyone would’ve anticipated updates and new features, cause its the Apple. But, things were getting hard to digest. Apple has taken the biggest ever leap in the domain of Personal Computing. And there is every possibility that each one inside the convention was getting the thought of whether “this could be The Perfect Operating System Ever !”.
Among all the updates and improvements that Apple has brought out this time, Lion is surely the one to take notice of – that is 200 new feature upgrades from its previous OS X SnowLeopard.
Apple has perfectly understood the ecology of Sharing. They’ve brought Twitter into everything that is there in the Mac. Forget the idea of Tweeting from an App. Now, you can tweet from every App that works in Mac. iPhoto, Safari, Photobooth and all other apps. You don’t even need to launch stuff from the Dashboard. Just tweet right from the Notification Center.
Facebook might be the one that wasn’t expected much. After all, we thought, Facebook is with Microsoft and integration into Apple isn’t going to happen. But, Apple is more keen about killing Google. Although not as fully integrated into the OS, Facebook is definitely making its way into it. It has got a lot of users. So, bringing Facebook is surely a good choice to go with. You can share your photos, updates from any apps just like the Twitter and from the notification center too !
But, remember, Apple has given us space to type and share. But, can you really check on what others do ? You can type in your update. Post in, “I’m here. I’m cooking. I’m having fun and the like.” In a very crude form, sharing is just not about telling others what you do. It also knowing what others do. This lacks heavily in OS X Lion.
The new Notification Center draws heavily from the Linux Gnome2 and Unity desktops. These guys know how best to bring out the Social Integration and notifications into the traditional desktop environments and Apple has just made it better. All the information and updates – Email, Chat, Software Update, Backups, Reminders and everything you need to keep track of is right in the Notification Center.
The iCloud has got too better with the new update. It can now sync mail,calendar, messages and documents. Speaking of which, I just get reminded that iMessage has come to the Macs. Yeah. They are finally here. They’ve been on iOS devices like iPhone and iPod Touch devices and bringing them onto Macs have been things just way too easy. Document sync is what Apple keeps telling about. Nothing is new here. It works just like Google Docs but with an Application interface. You can do multiple edits simultaneously and all changes get reflected to all the devices authorized to edit the documents and synced in the Cloud.
PowerNap. Essentially, your computer does all the activity in the background – syncs emails, updates, receives chats, even when it is in sleep. I really wonder why Apple keeps boasting on tiny little features that are already available in other desktop environments, like they did it the first time. This feature, although not very functional as the one in OS X, is however present in all the Linux desktops. Just some improvements here and there. PowerNap feature was also introduced long back in Windows Developer Conference in September last year by the name ‘Connected Standby’.
Dictation which was hitherto not available or if not, available only through some specific application, has also been included as a feature in OS X Lion. You can dictate notes and it works well in all the Apps, even Microsoft Word they say : P . But, I’m not sure however if the speech recognition is so good. Humans are diverse creatures. Each one could have a varying pitch or tone. Only we, humans can understand what others speak. I’m beginning to think if Apple has really cracked the code on making it ‘workable’ universally for all people using various dialects and phonetics.
And finally, the all new Dashboard. We have the accept that Apple are the ones who pioneered this system and Gnome3 just incorporated it from them – from their developer preview. You can launch applications from the dashboard with its thumbnails on for preview.
Although I find, some of the features repeated, most of them here are quite comforting, at least to the normal person who isn’t so geeky and is just another regular user.