Apple released the latest version of the Mac operating system, Mac OSX Lion last night. Lion is the next major release after Snow Leopard. It’s only been out for a few hours but already there are raving reviews about Lion. With over 90% of people giving it 5 stars on the Mac App Store. With all the hype surrounding the big new features of Lion such as Auto-Save, Multi-Touch Gestures, Mission Control and Full-Screen Apps, some other very useful new features of Lion aren’t getting much air time. So here for your enjoyment are 7 not so well known features in Lion.
AirDrop
How often do you need to transfer a file to a computer next to you via USB? Thankfully this is a thing of the past with AirDrop. With AirDrop you simply open the finder and drag and drop the file needed to the nearby computer. No extra setup required. Of course this will only work with Macs running Lion, so the USB drive isn’t obsolete just yet.
Add Your Signature To A PDF
The most annoying part of emailing paperwork is signing it. Thankfully Apple has helped us out here. Just by holding a piece of paper with your signature up to your iSight/Facetime camera on your Mac, you can add that signature to any file in Preview.
Improved Scene Recording
This is one of the features that I’m looking forward to most. With Snow Leopard, Apple introduced screen recording to Quicktime, and with Lion, it get’s better. Firstly, you can now set it so that clicks will show during your screen capture, and secondly, you can now choose to record only part of the screen, as opposed to the whole screen. Stay tuned to see some screen casts.
Search Tokens
The Mac operating system has always had great search, but it’s even better with Lion. One of the improvements are search tokens. This means that you can search with more than one term. So for example you can now search for all emails from “Calum” containing the word “Hi”, all right from the Finder.
Simple And Cheap Installation
Not only is Lion cheap, it’s also really easy to install. I mean surprisingly easy. Step one, download (around 4GB) from the Mac App Store. Step two, click on installer. Done. Sure you have to click through one or two buttons, but man is it easy! Total time: less than 2.5 hours.
Quick Look In Spotlight
Spotlight is one of my favourite features in MacOSX. The little spotlight in the top right corner of the screen is the quickest way to launch an application or a document. Simply by typing in the first four letters, such as “safa” and then hitting return, you can open Safari. Spotlight has been joined in Lion by one of my other favourite features, Quick Look. When you have any file selected, hitting the space bar opens a preview of your file. These two features have combined so that whenever you select a file in Spotlight, you’ll get a Quick Look at the file. Neat.
Improved Auto-Correction
If there’s one area that Macs have lagged behind PCs, it’s been auto-correction. Office has had a greta auto-correct tool for quick sometime, but Apple has had no such thing with iWork. But now auto-correct is embedded throughout the system, in a very iOS way. The auto-correct function in Lion is very helpful for typos, and has already saved me quite some time.
Hopefully you’ve learnt a little bit more about Lion, if you would like to learn even more, you can view all the features of Lion on the Apple website.
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I like the three finger tap on a word for the Dictionary definition, Thesaurus and Wikipedia entry. Smart.
Hey Matt, that definitely is a cool feature. I don’t get to use it because I’ve got an iMac and a Magic Mouse. No trackpad for me.
I must admit that I’m a little sad that I don’t get all the features.
Thanks for stopping by!