As expected, and following on their huge earnings report yesterday, Apple released OS X 10.7, better know as Lion, this morning.

I’ll have more to say about it after I have it installed somewhere, but in the meantime you can get all (and I mean all) the details in John Siracusa’s incredibly in-depth review on Ars Technica. Seriously, it’s like 20 pages long, but well worth reading if you really want all the details about what’s new.

Lion is $30 and can be installed directly from the Mac App Store. Don’t forget to make a backup first!

Anthony Hecht is The Stranger's Chief Technology Officer. He owns no monkeys.

10 replies on “Apple Releases New OS”

  1. I’ve had Lion for a week or so now and let me tell you, IT GODDAMN ROCKS.

    The new Mac Mail is kick ass, VERY welcome additions to WebKit (though I’m not thrilled with the 1Password integration- it’s now similar to FireFox), better security (esp. if you download lots of 3rd party apps, extensions, etc), and the app mgmt is sweet when you have to have multiple apps open at once.

  2. My giant pet peeve: Spaces, full screen, and multiple monitors.

    I can’t run movies on my TV any more. DVD Player wants to show that stitched pattern on my TV and make my main screen the full screen. I have to attempt to play movies in VLC (which doesn’t understand skipping half the time) to get things full screen on my TV.

  5. @2 I exclusively use VLC and have never had a problem with skipping with in a movie (regardless if I’m playing a movie locally or over the WiFis). I’ve never been a DVDPlayer fan. Maybe check your refresh rate on VLC or download the update.

    Personally, while it does take a bit to get use to, I love the new fullscreen (I actually utilize it now), and also multiple screens is greatly improved.

  6. Out helpdesk won’t even upgrade our developers to Snow Leopard. I’ll probably be using Java 1.8 before I get Lion.

  7. @5
    No, as in, it starts playing the first file it finds on the DVD, and half the time it doesn’t want to get to the menu screen if I skip the little 30 second-two minute preview blah blahs. It just starts it over again from the beginning.

  8. @6: Time for a new job!

    I’ve been running the final version of Lion since the 2nd (yay for being a Mac developer), and—outside of a couple minor hiccups with tools like MySQL and Xcode—Lion’s been a huge step up from Snow Leopard. Totally worth upgrading, but *please* do a backup first.

  9. @2, I agree, and Apple has to have known the full-screen thing was annoying, yet they did it anyway. It’s rather baffling. That said, I actually use VLC for video playing.

    I also think that they could have worked harder integrating the Launchpad, Dashboard and Dock — or would that have felt too Android-y to them?

    Finally, I really appreciate that they’re finally pushing continuous saving, though I think their terminology is a little awkward (e.g. “unlock”). It would also have been nice to have seen some sort of platform for version control rather than just snapshots. I understand that plenty of existing binary file formats might not handle version control well — but if they’d built a UI basis for version control, things like Photoshop’s History could end up being a continuous journal saved to disk, rather than something that disappears after you change too many things or restart Photoshop.

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