Hi Ruben, I guess with any new gadget or piece of software there will be a wide range of reactions and people will derive different levels of utility from them, but as someone who lives in Snow Leopard, I personally, cannot wait to upgrade to Lion. I believe it could be yet another Apple quiet revolution. A case in point is Snow Leopard. Because the upgrade went so well most people did not even notice that Macs have been successfully ported to 64 bit computing. This is something that Microsoft still has not been able to manage completely. As a result of the move most of my favourite applications were also ported to a native Cocoa interface -- including all the Apple iLife and iWork suites, all OS X system tools and among others, Lightroom, and Photoshop. Microsoft still has not managed the transition to Cocoa and 64 bit with Office. As you say, Rueben, a lot of work was done in the code. Two of the manifestations of this are Grand Central Dispatch, that allows Snow Leopard to more effectively use the multiple cores now found in top of the line iMacs and PowerMacs, and OpenCL. OpenCL is a new open standard that is being adopted by major GPU manufacturers. It will allow programs to send processor intensive work to the Graphics Processing Unit. Considering the enormous power of GPUs these days, when software fully takes advantage of this API we will see notable increases in speed.
Now about Lion. I believe that Apple's intent here is to make Macs just work in the way that iPads do now. A child of 6 (and I am talking from real life experience here) can pick up an iPad, start games and entertain themselves, unassisted for hours. What's more, a child in his fifties, namely me, has found a series of applications that change the way I consume media and browse the internet. Lion may still have OS X running behind the interface (in the same way that the iPhone and the iPad have a scaled back version of OS X) but in the world of the user interface it has the option of operating differently. The option of full screen apps mean that rather than having fiddly windows all over the desktop, a user can devote full attention to the app that is running. If you want the weather forecast, bring up, say, a Bureau of Meteorology app full screen, read the forecast and the go back to writing your email. Another important difference in the app model of software, is that you never have to save data. Saving is automatic and when you reopen an app, it will pick up where you left off. The user does not have to know about a file system unless they want to. An app's data is stored within the app bundle itself, and often only app itself needs to access its own data. On the other hand data can be shared with other apps where that makes sense. Apple is also trying to bring the very successful App Store model to the desktop. The App Store does most of the work for independent developers. It will serve, advertise, and even collect payment for software for only 30% of the purchase price. This is really a great bargain considering the world-wide audience that the App Store serves. The App Store for the iPhone and the iPad caused a renaissance on software development for those devices. We will now likely see the same for the Mac. Also once you have purchased an app from the App Store, even if you hard drive fails and you lose the original software, there will be a record of your purchase and you will be able to download a new copy in the same way that you can re-download your songs from iTunes. While many derided the iPad as just a big iPhone, I could not wait to get my hands one. And I was not in the least disappointed. Enough waxing lyrical about Apple for one day. I have some work to do. :-) Cheers, Carlo On 2010-12-27, at 12:45, Dark1 wrote: > > So far Lion seems like a pretty minor (and uninteresting) update to me. SL > didn't implement many new features but there was a massive amount of work > done on the code. > > Ruben -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
