Mac OS X Lion Pocket Guide

Chapter 1. What’s New in Lion?

Surely there are some people who pine for the days of the Apple II and the command-line interface. For those who have moved on from the era of loading programs from cassette tapes and floppy disks, Lion is the latest version of Apple’s OS X, and it’s a large step forward from Snow Leopard, which came out in 2009. If you ask someone what has changed with Lion, they might tell you “Just about everything,” and they’d be right. But don’t let the changes in Lion scare you—even though differences abound, if you want to keep using your Mac the same way you used it with an earlier version of OS X, you’ll still be able to use Lion without any problems.

Once you’ve used Lion for a few minutes, you’ll note that a lot of the features that you find different in Lion seem a lot like iOS, the operating system that powers your iPhone and iPad. Lion isn’t a naked copy of iOS—what works in a finger-driven OS doesn’t always work in a keyboard- and mouse-driven environment—but the success of the iOS devices has clearly had an impact on the Mac side of Apple. Like the iPhone and iPad, Lion gives you access to an App Store (devoted to Macs). You also get the option of using a screen similar to iOS for launching applications, and Mail has become a lot more like the iPhone Mail app.

Those are just a few obvious changes, but there are plenty more. As you’d expect, many of the applications and utilities that get installed along with OS X have been updated for Lion’s coming-out ...