The roar of the Lion is soon here. The Mac OS X Lion that is. Our mac experts have heard rumors that it will be out this summer. What does this mean? Should you get it? Do you have to buy a new Mac to install it?
Lion is all about meshing the iPad into a Mac. Essentially, the new Mac operating system will let you buy apps like you can on the iPad. This is possible by the new Launchpad. Launchpad is located right on your dock. Once you click it, a new screen appears with all of your apps, much like the iPad or iPhone shows.
Besides Launchpad, the rest of the features focus in on the navigation. Mission Control lets you see all of your open programs with easily viewable picture icons. Multi-touch gestures work on the touchpad much like the iPad touchscreen does. Auto Save continuously saves your work so you don’t have to worry about losing unsaved docs. Resume is a cool feature that leaves your work exactly how you left off. This comes in handy after being prompted to restart due to a software update.
Beyond navigational features, Mail 5 has an entirely new layout view and conversational view, a la Gmail. A very cool new program is AirDrop. Just find someone near you and wireless share a file, pic, or whatever you’d like. An easy mac networking service. Finally, Lion Server is built into the Mac OS X Lion. This allows you to easily turn your mac into a server. Why? Well, you can easily share files to your Mac server from your iPad or other computers.
You don’t need to buy a new Mac to install Lion. If you’re a big App Store consumer, this is a perfect product for you. You’ll be able to have the full functionality of the Mac OS with an iPad built in.