Apple today brought us one giant leap closer to OS X Lion. It was announced today that Lion will arrive in July but no specific date in July was given.
What we do know is that OS X Lion will be available as a download through the Mac App Store and will come in at 4GB in size for a price of $29.99.
You can watch a video introduction of Lion here.
Because OS X Lion will be available through the Mac App Store it means there will be no need to purchase a boxed (CD) copy in order to install the operating system. One of the problems with this approach is that it isn’t compatible with OS X prior to Snow Leopard because you can’t install the Mac App Store on earlier systems.
It is not yet clear whether Apple will provide a boxed copy of OS X Lion for those that do not have Snow Leopard installed on their system. However, this Amazon listing that lets you pre-order OS X Lion may indicate that there is a boxed option for OS X Lion available.
More than 250 new features and 3,000 developer APIs make up the feature set of OS X Lion, Apple’s 8th major OS X release.
Some of the new features include new gestures, system wide full screen support for apps, Mission Control – a quick way to find and stagger all apps running on your system, Launchpad – a system for quickly accessing apps, and a revamped Mail.app.
“The Mac has outpaced the PC industry every quarter for five years running and with OS X Lion we plan to keep extending our lead,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The best version of OS X yet, Lion is packed with innovative features such as new Multi-Touch gestures, system-wide support for full screen apps, and Mission Control for instantly accessing everything running on your Mac.”
Mission Control will combine Exposé, full screen apps, Dashboard, and Spaces into one unified app on your Mac.
OS X Lion will also come with Resume – it will remember how you last left your desktop, what apps you had open, etc… and allow you to continue from that point.
Versions will allow you to easily manage your documents and avoid the chaos that sometimes comes when dealing with iterations of documents.