Five Things I Love About OS X Lion

Today I have an excellent guest post from my son, who now knows even more about Apple Macs than I do!

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I am, relatively speaking, new to Macs. I purchased my first one, a 13 inch Mac Book Pro, about four months ago, and immediately fell in love with it. After watching the WWDC announcement I got very excited about some of the new features that were to come in the new OS. I was disappointed by some inaccurate rumours, but finally, it was released. The download took a while, but it was a pretty seamless process. I've now had a good week to play around with new features, so I thought I'd share some of my favourites.

Mission Control

I never really used spaces in Snow Leopard, but I have to say, I love being able to have multiple desktops. Having the ability to arrange your apps in different desktops and then being able to flick through them all is great. This works especially well with apps that have been given full-screen functionality. Then, with a quick gesture, you can get a bird’s eye view of what's going on. You can move your apps between the different desktops and, with a simple click, add new desktops. Mission Control also nicely groups multiple windows of an application, and even gives them the icon. Unfortunately though, it appears you cannot rearrange the order your desktops are in. 

Natural Scrolling

With Lion, has come a huge leap towards iOS functionality. Many of the new features mirror those included with the Macs’ handheld counterparts. One of these being natural scrolling. The new ‘reversed’ scrolling is, as the name suggests, a lot more natural. It’s very like the scrolling on the iOS platform, and feels like you are moving the actual content on the screen. Although this can be changed back to the original one in the system settings, I think it is something everyone should get used to. 

Launchpad

This again, is another feature that been taken right off the iOS platform. With a nice, easy gesture you can pull up Launchpad, with all your apps displayed, much like on an iPad, and, as you’d expect, you can put them in folders too. This, combined with Mission Control, means that now you can actually avoid using the dock at all. I’m not suggesting you should but it is an option.

Spotlight

When I started using a Mac I initially didn’t appreciate the power of Spotlight, but as I started to use it I really began to see its uses. In OS X Lion it is even better. It now gives you the ability to drag your searched item into email, browser, folder, AirDrop or anywhere! Spotlight also now boasts an instant preview; moving your cursor over any of the results gives you an instant preview of its content, even video!

Resizing from any edge

Admittedly this is just a small feature, but one I have found infinitely useful. Being able to resize a window from any of the edges definitely comes in handy!

There are well over 200 new features in Lion, but these are just five I have found useful in my first week of using it. 

You can follow me on Twitter at @gcjensen