First, let me apologize for the headline. And now, the news. It appears that Mac OS X Lion isn’t exactly taking the Mac world by storm: after brisk initial sales following the July 20 release of 10.7, growth seems to have stagnated.

This is based on visitor tracking by analytics firm Chitika, whose latest numbers indicate that Lion is still a long way from catching up to Snow Leopard and even plain old Leopard, which despite being several years old is still making up a fifth of their Mac visitors. Lion? Stalled at 16%, up just 2% from the end of September. It’s a reverse hockey stick.

This chart shows the absolute representation of the OS in their stats. If you could zoom out, for perspective, Windows XP and 7 would probably be at around five or six times the height of this portion.

What could be the reason for the slow adoption rate, if we can trust these numbers?

My opinion would be simply that the features aren’t attractive to the average user. While some of the new ideas and features are certainly useful, I confess my own bafflement at how irrelevant most are to everyday use. Few users will see Mission Control and Launchpad and think “yes, these are much better than Expose and a shortcut to the apps folder in the Dock.” Because really, they aren’t much better.

Mail, Airdrop, and full screen apps are useless to the many users who have adopted web apps for email, sharing, and daily tasks. Resume and disk encryption are invisible and not really interesting to casual users who don’t understand them (“what, why wouldn’t I quit something when I’m done?”) and won’t see them in action.

What’s left of the update apparently isn’t worth the thirty bucks.

It’s not that Lion is bad, but I think I understand people’s trepidation to undergo the update process (backing up and so on, easier than ever but still beyond many users) for features that don’t pop. Snow Leopard is fast and stable, and has access to most key apps and services. What’s the hurry?

Naturally the numbers will continue to grow, as Lion ships on all of Apple’s popular computers, and sales are better than ever. The rumored Air-style MacBook Pro series would provide a nice boost as well. But the trends suggest that Lion’s road to OS X dominance is going to be a long and slow one.

Apple CEO Tim Cook just announced that Apple sold six million copies of Lion, the company’s latest operating system. Apple released Lion on July 20, adding new iOS-like features to the OS operating system and improving system performance.

To put this into perspective, Apple sold that number over three months while Microsoft sold 240 million copies of Windows 7 in 2010, or about 20 million a month. However, Cook reported that the OS sold 80% better than the previous release, Snow Leopard.

Gartner estimated that 4.5 percent of new PCs would ship with OS X in 2011 and expects 5.2 percent to ship with OS X in 2015. Cook said that the “the MacBook Pro and iMac are the number one best selling notebook and desktop in the US. This momentum is not just limited to a mode. The Mac outgrew the PC market by almost six times.”

“It took Windows 7 20 weeks to reach 10% of installed base. Lion did this in two weeks,” said Cook.

I’ve been using a pretty cool app of late called Fantastical. It’s OS X-only but I suspect the Windows crowd would get a kick out of it as well.

Basically it’s a natural language calendar app. You can paste (nearly) anything into its little window and it will automagically create an event. “Dinner with Joe at 5pm on Thursday” works just as you would imagine it would and unless today is Thursday, Fantastical will figure things out. It fumbles sometimes with word order and ends up setting all day lunches with “Tuesday” but most of the time that’s reparable with a few keystrokes.

The app does reproduce some of the features of OS X Mail, especially the automatic date entry features, but I’ve found that I use it to record flight times by copying and pasting them from the airline website and I’m able to create ad hoc events (“Drinks with T-Pain 5pm Weds”) and even simple reminders (“call Dalai Lama tomorrow”).

The company, founded by school chums Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland the app has been around since May. There’s a new update coming shortly that will enable in-line calendar entry editing. The app costs $20 and is available for a free trial.

The pair built their own CalDAV implementation so it works with almost any calendaring service. It also has a custom alarm setting as well as complete search functionality. Again, it’s stuff that has existed before, but now it’s in one place with a quick and easy interface. It, along with apps like QuicKeys, has streamlined my day-to-day PIM and writing activities considerably. We don’t review a lot of apps on TC (we’ll probably start adding app reviews over time) but this is an app that I got a big kick out of and I think it’s quite simple and quite useful.

Product Page

Lion is here — and as MG summed up in just 3,000 words, it’s great.

No operating system is perfect, though. At least, not for everyone, and especially not right out of the (non-existent) box. Looking to make your Lion experience that much better, we’ve bundled together a bevy of tips and tricks that you really ought to have ready on your first trip into the new OS.

Now, something to keep in mind: these tips aren’t one-size-fits-all. Read through the list and pick out the ones that sound good, and be sure to drop a comment if you’ve got a tip of your own.

Leave It Alone For A Few Hours:

Here’s why: Lion makes a good number of changes to the way the Spotlight search works. These changes seem to require a reindexing of your hard drive’s contents . The problem? Apple starts this reindexing immediately after Lion boots up for the first time, and it causes systems (even relatively new ones) to run like hot garbage until it’s done. Give Spotlight a few hours after install is complete to work everything out, and you’ll have a much better first impression.

Check Out PDF Signing In Preview:

Three years ago, I threw my printer in the trash. I got tired of stupid ink, and stupid drivers, and that stupid grey box taking up space on my desk. I haven’t missed it since.

Okay, fine. There’s one time I always miss it: whenever I need to print and sign a contract. Thanks to a fancy (but somewhat hidden) new feature in Lion’s Preview app, I’ll never miss my printer again.

Open up a PDF in Preview. Click the annotations button (), then click the signature button (), then hit “Create Signature from Built-in iSight”. Scribe your signature onto a white piece of paper, hold it up to your iSight, and bam: you’ve got a stampable version of your signature sitting in Preview. Mr. Printer, meet Mr. Trash Can.

Reverse Mouse/Touchpad Scrolling:

Some love it. Some hate it. Gruber says to give it a week. I say screw it — do whatever feels best to your brain. I personally think it makes sense on a trackpad, but doesn’t feel right on a mouse — unfortunately, one setting controls the direction of both. As I use a mouse more than 90% of the time, I’ve reversed the setting.

You can find the checkbox to set the scroll direction to what you’re used to under System Preferences > Trackpad > Scroll and Zoom. Look for the “Scroll Direction: natural” option.

Re-enable Dot Indicators Under Running Apps:

This one’s a weird one, as it depends on whether you upgraded to Lion or bought a new system running Lion out of the box.

If you upgraded, your running apps will have the glowing dot indicators you’re used to seeing in the dock. If you’re on a new Lion system, they won’t. With Apple trying to move to a persistent state/instant start app design model, these running indicators may eventually be unnecessary. For now, though, with the vast majority of apps still being designed for Snow Leopard and earlier, the lack of dots is just really damned confusing.

You can re-enable the dots under System Preferences > Dock > Show indicator lights for open applications

Software update:

Lion is new, but there’s still a good chunk of stuff that needs to be updated right out of the gate. You’ll want to update iTunes, iLife, and iWork, for example, to get all the fancy new fullscreen features out of them. Just run the Software Update app found under the Apple logo in the upper left of the screen.

Disable Dashboard In Mission Control:

Mission Control (Apple’s new all-encompassing view of everything running on your system) is awesome. So much so, in fact, that “Use Mission Control” was going to be one of the tips here, but I pulled it assuming that it’s a core enough feature that everyone will be using it anyway. Learn the gestures, and learn the keyboard hotkeys.

There’s one thing that’s a bit weird about Mission Control, though: for one reason or another, it pulls your widget dashboard in as if it’s a separate Desktop/Space, which get’s reaaaally annoying if you’re using the gestures/hotkeys to quickly switch from view to view. Who uses the dashboard so much that the standard key (F12) isn’t enough?

You can keep dashboard from appearing in Mission Control by toggling the option found under System Preferences > Mission Control > Show Dashboard As Space.

Give Filevault Another Chance:

Apple’s real-time disk encryption tool, Filevault, used to suck. A lot. If one tiny little bit in your Filevault image got flipped, the entire thing would explode in your face. Bam! Data gone! It was enough for many to swear off Filevault entirely, myself included.

Well, it’s time to give Filevault another shot. Apple has completely rebuilt it — so much so, in fact, that the only thing the new version really shares with its predecessor is its name. The new full-disk-encryption based setup is super fast, super secure, and has essentially no impact on your system performance. Oh, and it won’t randomly eat all your data.

Learn the new multi-touch gestures:

Apple teaches you how to two-finger scroll the first time you boot up Lion, but myriad other gestures go unmentioned. Some of the best multi-touch gestures:

• Swipe between pages: Scroll left or right with two fingers
• Swipe between full-screen apps/desktops: Swipe left or right with three fingers
• Access Mission Control: Swipe up with three fingers
• Show Launchpad (All of your installed apps in an iOS-esque view): Pinch with thumb and three fingers
• Show desktop: Spread with thumb and three fingers

Disable Autocorrect:

Oh, Apple. Haven’t you learned anything from auto-correct on the iPhone?

The optional autocorrect in OS X doesn’t seem to be nearly as sensitive (or hilarious) as its iOS equivalent, but it still misfires from time-to-time. You’re a big boy (or girl) on a big boy (or girl) keyboard. You can type fine. Unless you’re constantly swapping “teh” for “the”, you can turn off autocorrect under System Preferences > Language & Text > Text > Correct spelling automatically.

Got any tips you think others should see? Drop’em in the comments.

Although you won’t find any Apple users who will admit it, Macs do occasionally crash and fail, sometimes in spectacular ways. In my experience, while they have far fewer visible errors, the ones that users end up seeing are more serious than the scattered Windows annoyances and driver issues. But by and large, recovery and error management haven’t needed to be among Apple’s marquee features. Graceful failure is a merit, but not something you want listed next to Mission Control and AirDrop.

So it’s no surprise that an interesting little feature built into Lion is receiving next to no promotion — though Apple is far from hiding it. The improved recovery console is a nice feature, but it’s the Internet Recovery thing I’m more interested in.

Here’s Apple’s succinct user-facing explanation of the feature:

If your Mac problem is a little less common — your hard drive has failed or you’ve installed a hard drive without OS X, for example — Internet Recovery takes over automatically. It downloads and starts Lion Recovery directly from Apple servers over a broadband Internet connection. And your Mac has access to the same Lion Recovery features online.

Perhaps it’s not being trumpeted because it’s not really a new feature. Macs have been able to boot from a networked drive for quite some time — over a decade, in fact. The fact that it was limited to locally-administrated networks with locally-hosted disk images isn’t a limitation of NetBoot itself, but was simply a pragmatic measure considering remotely downloading even a couple hundred megs on a circa-1999 connection would be impractical. So the capability is nothing new, but making it a standard recovery feature is.

Apple is making itself the net admin and switching from a local protocol to a remote one, that’s all. Like so many cloud services, it is a possibility now because of improvements in bandwidth and storage capacity, not because of any magical new powers possessed by MacBook Airs.

An interesting bit is that this recovery mode works even if your drive is blank — as in zeroed. The normal Recovery HD stuff occupies a (quite hefty) partition of your boot drive, so Internet Recovery can’t live there if it’s to work with a fresh or scrambled drive. It must live in the onboard EFI firmware, which is reassuring but a little creepy. Even if you crack open your Mac and swap out the drive, it’s still going to wake up thinking I am a Macintosh.

From there on it’s business as usual. It loads a Recovery HD disk image from Apple’s servers and you’re off to the races. The little recovery partition is likely nothing more than the most basic graphical and executable items necessary to interface with the wifi (WPA only), store, decode the disk image, and so on.

This shouldering by Apple of bandwidth and administrative duties for non-power users is certainly indicative of their upcoming iCloud and iTunes strategies. They’ve got motive and opportunity (not to mention the cash and the hardware) to shift pretty much all your content server-side, including (though by baby steps at first) the OS itself. And the statement they want to make to the consumer and user is this: “We’ve got it.” They’re taking responsibility away from the user in other ways as well (to be discussed later), and obscuring the inside of the machine has been a priority for Apple for a decade; this is just another, slightly less visible, portion of their moving everything but the very facade of their devices away from the grasp of the user, for good or ill.

Lion will come on a USB drive next month for the rather curious price of $70, but you can save money by making your own bootable disc or drive. The “installESD.dmg” file is lurking inside your Lion installer, and making it bootable is… a job for Google. You paid for it, so do what you want with it. I’ll be damned if I’m paying $40 extra for their USB drive, so I’ll be doing this as soon as I upgrade.

[some info via this Hacker News thread]

All My Files View – All My Files is just that – all of your files, ordered by kind, name, date, and modification times. It’s a bit hard to figure out All My Files at first but once you see the utility, it becomes indispensable. You can also organize your own views, selecting files of a certain type that you edited in the past few days or finding all of the disk hogging images on your hard dive. It’s nothing too earth shattering, but it’s useful.

Launchpad – Does that picture remind you of anything? The icons? The little app folders? The little dots at the botton to signify current page? Of all the cues Lion takes from iOS, this spot is most strikingly hints at a future touch interface. Add in four-finger pinch and zoom gestures and you have almost instantaneous access to your apps.

AirDrop – AirDrop is like Dropbox for OS X users. You can see other computers nearby and send them files just by dropping them on their icon. It’s a bit hard to demonstrate it without other Lion users around, but it should be interesting when it starts to work. It will also be an excellent way to send kitten pictures to your co-workers while they’re trying to work.

Mission Control – OS X Lion does away with spaces and instead offers a new four-finger scroll movement that slides between your desktops and Daskboard. Gone is the “Dashboard flying in from outer space effect” and instead Dashboard appears to be another desktop. Mission Control shows a real-time representation of every app currently running and offers instant access to the windows you currently have open.

The New Mail – The new Mail app allows for threaded conversations, a la the iPhone and has a decidedly iPhone-like interface. The Junk Filter changes an email’s color and refuses to download images until you request them and there is a simple, two pane interface (emails and a viewer) that can pop out to a three-pane (a list of accounts appears) interface if needed.

Runner Up… Diskless Install! -
This has to be one of the coolest aspects of the new Lion – a completely DVD-free install. You grab the DMG, mount it, and run the update. A few minutes later you have OS X Lion on your machine. It is a real boon for those running Airs and it makes you feel a little better because you’re helping the environment and not wasting a DVD.

iPhone3GS
iPhone4 (GSM)
iPod touch 3G
iPod touch 4G
iPad1
AppleTV2G (v4.3 8F202)

In other words, just about everything except the iPad 2. Redmond Pie has links to all of the ipsw files you need to get the deed done. iOS 4.3.3, if you’ll recall, is the update that fixed the location tracking problem. Otherwise, not much has changed since 4.3.2 so you could either sit still on this one or, like all others with iPads 2, curse the jailbreaking gods for not supplying you with a product that will crack your firmware.

Meet Witness. Witness is the little Mac app that turns iSight into a motion-activated security camera. If an intrusion is detected, Witness will send instant alerts to users along with videos and stills to their iPhone or iPad.

Witness requires Mac OS X 10.6 and of course, a Mac with built-in iSight. It’s available now for $39, or $29 for students

[via Macnn]

This matters for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the first update to the OS X Lion preview which many developers complained was fairly buggy. Despite the bugs, the preview went a month without any updates. More importantly, this is the build that Apple is considering to be a “GM1″ revision internally, we hear. And yes, it’s said to be much more stable and complete than the previous build.

You’ll note that the build number has jumped pretty dramatically: from 11A390 for the initial build to 11A419. That seems to indicate that a number of builds were tested out internally before this one was released.

Having said that, it’s unlikely that this will be the actual “Golden Master” copy. We’re still a solid two months away from Apple’s WWDC event where Lion will be a key area of focus. Apple may attempt to launch Lion there, but more likely is that the release candidates is handed out to developers there. A public launch would come shortly thereafter.

This developer preview 2 launch follows a smaller update that came through earlier so that developers could get this latest build of Lion through the Mac App Store. As we previously reported, that initial roll-out was less than ideal.

Again, this build of OS X Lion is for developers only.

It has been one month since Apple unveiled a developer preview of their latest operating system, OS X Lion. And while the initial deployment was a bit rocky, Apple appears to have worked through their initial Mac App Store distribution issues. And now another update looms — and it’s potentially a big one.

Specifically, Apple is gearing up to deploy an OS X Lion update to developers that they may be classifying as the “GM1″ release, we’ve heard. “GM” or “Golden Master” is a title reserved for software that is complete. But from what we’ve heard, this is only the initial Golden Master candidate. In other words, don’t get too excited just yet.

Apple has been working through many OS X Lion bugs and performance issues as they move towards the stated Summer release date. Given that GM candidates are already nearing, they definitely appear to be on schedule.

With OS X Snow Leopard, Apple released the GM version to developers just a few weeks before the actual software launched to the public. Presumably, if there were no bugs in this first GM candidate for Lion, they could stick to a similar timetable. But there probably will be, so instead I’d guess that a June timeframe will be more likely.

That would still mean an early Summer release — and potentially one before Summer technically even begins. After all, early June would line up nicely with the June 5 to 9 timeframe that Apple’s WWDC event is likely to take place this year. We’ll see — but work is clearly progressing quickly.

[photo: flickr/cheetah100]

Back in October of last year, the day before it was formally unveiled, I wondered if OS X Lion would be the last of its kind. There were two main arguments: the big cat name choice and the colossal rise of iOS. With today’s news that OS X father Bertrand Serlet is leaving Apple after 14 years (and 22 years working with CEO Steve Jobs), the question has come roaring back to life.

Apple has been giving OS X big cat nicknames since 10.0 (though they started off as informal codenames at first). The forthcoming latest iteration, OS X 10.7, has been given the name “Lion”, the king of the jungle. But more important than the name is what’s inside Lion: iOS-like features. A transition is happening. Apple made this very clear during the initial preview of Lion. It’s OS X meets the iPad.

Some have been interpreting this transition as a reason for Serlet’s departure. After all, why would he leave now in the “middle” of OS X Lion’s development, as Gizmodo puts it, unless he was unhappy? But the truth is that OS X Lion is pretty much locked and loaded at this point. There’s undoubtedly polish being added, but it’s being released to the public in a few months after a few years of work. Apple does not allow outsiders to see products in the “middle” of their development, and yet a developer beta of Lion has been out for weeks now.

This is not the same as key Chrome OS architect Matthew Papakipos jumping to Facebook last year. As it turns out, Papakipos actually did leave in the middle of development, as Chrome OS still has yet to be released to the public. The fact that Chrome OS is already about six months late from Google’s initial timetable (and is still a few months away) suggests Papakipos may have seen the writing on the wall. Again, that doesn’t appear to be the case with Serlet here.

Nor is this like the situation in which SVP of Devices Hardware Engineering, Mark Papermaster, left Apple last year amid the iPhone 4 antenna controversy.

Instead, Serlet appears to be transitioning out at a very natural time, as Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski details today. “He’s leaving because he feels it’s time and likely because Lion seems a perfect monument to his legacy at Apple,” Paczkowski writes.

At the same time, we are well into a massive software shift at Apple. Last quarter, Apple sold roughly 34 million devices that run iOS. During the same time, they sold about 4 million Macs running OS X (which was also a new record, by the way).

34 million to 4 million.

That’s not to say OS X is no longer important to Apple. Quite the contrary — you can’t make apps for iOS without OS X. And, of course, iOS is directly derived from OS X. We’re simply seeing the two begin to merge into a more unified experience. And new vice president of Mac Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, is leading that charge. That’s exactly why he took the stage last October to show off the new iOS-like features of Lion (whereas it was Serlet who took the stage two years ago to show off OS X Snow Leopard). It’s no longer point & click, it’s flick & swipe.

The main question still remains: is OS X Lion the last of its kind? Will Federighi’s first duty as head of Mac software be to more fully merge iOS and OS X? Will that be a “Mac OS XI” (or perhaps more appropriately, “OS Xi”) or something else?

Serlet may not be leaving as a result of OS X becoming more like iOS, but it’s happening nonetheless. Both appear to be natural transitions.

[image: Engadget]

In February of 2007, 83.24 percent of users visiting TechCrunch did so from a Windows machine. One year later, in February 2008, the stranglehold remained firm at 80.44 percent. In February 2009, the number was at 74.04 percent. Last year, it was 61.59 percent. And this year? The number of people visiting our site from Windows machines dipped to 53.84 percent.

The writing is on the wall.

Look at those numbers again for a second. In four years, Windows share among TechCrunch readers has fallen 30 percentage points. That’s incredible.

The knee-jerk reaction in the comment section will likely be something like “it’s because you guys cover Apple so much”. But the fact of the matter is that Macintosh share, after rising for three of those four years, fell last year as well. It’s the mobile devices — specifically the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices — that are eating away at Windows.

In fact, if the trend over the past four years continues at about the same pace, in two years, devices made by Apple (Macs, iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads) will surpass devices that run Windows as the top visitors to TechCrunch. And depending on how popular the iPad 2, iPhone 5, and OS X Lion are, it could easily happen next year.

Here are the broken down numbers:

Feb 2007

• Windows: 83.24%
• Mac: 13.59%
• Linux: 2.51%

Feb 2008

• Windows: 80.44%
• Mac: 15.15%
• Linux: 2.97%
• iPhone: 0.77%
• iPod: 0.15%

Feb 2009

• Windows: 74.04%
• Mac: 20.48%
• Linux: 3.01%
• iPhone: 1.60%
• iPod: 0.28%
• Android: 0.09%

Feb 2010

• Windows: 61.59%
• Mac: 28.62%
• iPhone: 4.07%
• Linux: 3.49%
• Android: 0.87%
• iPod: 0.53%

Feb 2011

• Windows: 53.84%
• Mac: 27.64%
• iPhone: 6.72%
• iPad: 3.44%
• Linux: 3.28%
• Android: 3.06%
• iPod: 0.62%

While even the last batch of stats shows that Windows still has a nice cushion over number two, Mac, if you add the Apple products put together, it’s a different story.

• Feb 2007: 13.59% Apple products
• Feb 2008: 16.07% Apple products
• Feb 2009: 22.36% Apple products
• Feb 2010: 33.22% Apple products
• Feb 2011: 38.42% Apple products

In the four year span, Apple has added 25 percentage points to their share among TechCrunch readers. That nearly all of the 30 percentage points that Windows lost in that same span (Android’s growth pretty much fills in the rest).

So it currently stands at Microsoft’s 53.84 percent versus Apple’s 38.42 percent. Again, a big year for iPad, iPhone, and Mac could mean a changing of the guard as soon as next year. But unless something drastic changes, you can be sure that Apple will be dominant among TechCrunch readers in two years.

The latest rumors have Windows 8 showing up sometime in mid/late 2012. But the fact of the matter is that Windows 7, much more widely praised than the disaster that was Vista, hasn’t helped Microsoft buck this trend among our readers. Perhaps they’re only hope of gaining back share at this point is Windows Phone. So far, that hasn’t been going too well. Nokia should help that, but will it be enough to offset the Windows losses?

Humorously, Microsoft’s best hope for not falling to Apple may well be Android. If Google’s platform continues to make gains, it could prolong Apple passing Microsoft.

But again, Apple has iPhone 5, iPad 2, and OS X Lion on the immediate horizon — all within the next few months. And then there’s the very real possibility of another iPad in the fall.

The iPad 2 and iPhone 5 are likely to push the Apple share forward immediately. But don’t sleep on OS X Lion either. The early indications are that Apple has indeed made it much more iOS-like. That means millions of iPad/iPhone/iPod touch owners who have traditionally been PC users, are going to feel a lot more comfortable on a Mac than ever before.

And a new PC-to-Mac data migration system built in to Lion will only help that.

OS X Lion is going to feed off of iOS users, and vice versa. And the Mac ecosystem is going to continue to expand. Just as happened in the browser world with Chrome taking over, a transition is happening among TechCrunch readers in the ecosystem space. The numbers don’t lie. And Microsoft better pray that our readers aren’t leading indicators of overall trends in the space — which is exactly what you have been in the past.

It has now been at least a year since I last used the optical drive on any of my computers. And now I’m really starting to believe I never will again. Which I love.

Last October, I noted that I was ready for the launch of the new MacBook Airs because I realized I had never once used the optical drive on my MacBook Pro. It was simply a huge waste of space. And since I’ve switched over to the Air — the best computer I’ve ever owned — I have zero doubt that this optical drive-free experience will soon be the reality for all Mac computing. And now it’s clear that OS X Lion will be the final ingredient needed.

The last time I can remember using my optical drive was to install OS X Snow Leopard, which was released a year and a half ago. But it’s becoming very clear that Apple will use the new Mac App Store to distribute the follow-up, OS X Lion. And despite a rocky start yesterday with the beta release, it makes a lot of sense.

But one thing I was worried about was system restores. It’s an issue that comes up again and again when I talk about the death of the optical disc. Apple deals with this on the MacBook Air by using a USB bootable restore drive. With the Mac App Store, I was thinking they may have to create a way to burn a backup CD or USB for Lion if you buy it over the web. But I was wrong.

As Cult of Mac notes today, there’s a new feature of OS X Lion which brings support for a separate recovery partition of a hard drive. In other words, if you need to restore your system, you can do it from the other area of the drive, no disc or USB drive needed.

Yep, Lion appears ready to maul the optical disc. And it’s unlikely to recover.

Some may wonder about the scenarios when a hard drive is damaged and the other partition doesn’t work. But for most restores, that’s not the case. And if that is the case, it’s probably best to just go to the Apple Store anyway.

In the newly upgraded MacBook Pros announced yesterday, Apple chose to keep the optical disc drive intact across the line. But rumors are already starting that the product may be totally redesigned next year. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that design more closely resembled the Air, with the removal of the optical drive (though perhaps the 17-inch model would keep it for those doing video work).

Just like the floppy disk before it, the optical disc will fade into irrelevance. And now you see why Apple has never included a Blu-ray drive in any of their machines.

Another interesting aspect of OS X Lion points to a future that eliminates hard drives with spinning discs as well. Lion brings TRIM support, which optimizes the clean up of data blocks on solid-state drives. Given the Air’s performance with these drives, there’s no question these will be the future of the Mac line as well.

All of this should be fairly obvious when you think about the future: clearly optical discs and regular hard drives will die off eventually. But Apple appears to be moving aggressively to make it happen sooner rather than later. And it will make rival devices seem unnecessarily slow and bulky — perfect prey for a lion.

[image: flickr/fortherock]

If there was any doubt in peoples’ minds that Apple intends to kill off the optical disc, it was put to rest today. This morning’s unveiling of the OS X Lion Developer Preview came with the news that it would only be available one way: through the Mac App Store. And while Apple wouldn’t say if they intended to release the final version of Lion to consumers this summer in the same way, it’s pretty clear that they’re going to do just that.

But this important push into the post-optical disc era hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for all so far.

Since the beta was first put up for download this morning, angry developers have flooded Apple’s forums. Why? Because many can’t install the software. But it’s not a bug in the OS itself that’s preventing them from doing it, it’s a bug in the distribution method — the Mac App Store.

In the past, when Apple has distributed test software to developers, they’ve done so through a website devoted to that. Once a developer entered their credentials, they could get access to a download link to get the software. But with the new method in place for OS X Lion, Apple had developers log in and get a special redemption code that they were told to use in the Mac App Store to get OS X Lion.

For some, that worked just fine. But once a large rush of developers started hitting the Mac App Store, deployment slowed to a crawl. And at points, things were at a total stand-still, several developers tell us. Given the interest, that’s somewhat understandable, except for the fact that if the connection to the Mac App Store was interrupted, paused, or cancelled after the download had started, it then became impossible to download OS X Lion at all.

This is apparently a bug in the deployment system. It seems that Apple is limiting downloads of the beta software installer to one machine. You can install the software on multiple machines, but you have to copy the installer from one machine to another manually. You cannot re-download it as you can with other software distributed through the Mac App Store.

And once the one-time download starts, Apple apparently assume it’s going to finish and they cut you off from being able to resume or restart a download. Hence the swarm of angry developers unable to get access to Lion today.

Clearly, this more strict distribution model is in place to prevent piracy and to ensure that regular users don’t move over to Lion before it’s ready to really show its stripes. But the situation today has been bad enough to lead many developers to question why Apple just didn’t stick with the old method for developer distribution. And it’s lead others to question the distribution method itself for such a high-scale roll-out.

Presumably, by going this route today, Apple wanted to further test the CD-killing system they’ve spent time and money building. Up until now, it has run pretty smoothly since its launch in January. And Apple undoubtedly needed to test the ability to dish out huge software downloads via this method — things like the final build of OS X Lion. It’s definitely better that they get the bugs out now, rather than when consumers flood the store to get Lion this summer.

I suspect we may end up seeing a hybrid launch this summer, with Apple using both DVDs in their retail stores/website and the Mac App Store to sell Lion. And perhaps Apple may even give those who decide to go the Mac App Store route, a discount. The one tricky thing about pure software distribution are system restores. Apple got around using an optical disc for this with the new MacBook Airs by using a USB stick. Perhaps they’ll include details on how to make your own such stick/disc if you download OS X from the Mac App Store.

With talk of MobileMe and other retail boxes vanishing from Apple Store shelves, this software distribution method is clearly the future for the entire platform. But it’s a future that’s still a work in progress.

Two days ago, we first reported that Apple was likely to release a developer beta of OS X Lion “soon”. Well, how’s this for soon? This morning, alongside their new MacBook Pros, Apple has announced the developer preview of the latest version of OS X. And the most interesting aspect may be how Apple is releasing this developer preview: through the Mac App Store.

Again, to be clear, this initial test version of the OS will be for developers only. The final version of Lion is still on track to be released this summer, Apple notes.

So what’s new? Well, we had previously heard about some of Lion’s features during a press conference last October. Today brings a few more of those features, including Auto Save, Versions, Resume, Mail version 5 (with a new threading feature called “Conversations”), AirDrop, and Lion Server (which itself has its own features).

As you can probably guess, many of these features borrow from what Apple has learned on the iPad/iPhone. That includes the ability to auto save documents and resume (even after you restart your Mac). The new version of Mail is also very iPad-like.

Overall, OS X UI has been altered to remove the standard side scrollbars OS X users will be used to seeing. Those have been replaced by scrollbars that only appear when you need them, again, just like iOS apps. Apple says that the UI is still called Aqua, but notes: “Aqua defines the look and feel that users come to expect from Mac OS X. Lion takes this experience and brings it to a new level with popovers, overlay scrollbars, and powerful Multi-Touch gestures and animations.”

AirDrop is a way to easily send files to any other Mac around wirelessly. It sort of sounds like DropBox, but peer-to-peer without the cloud element. Writes Apple:

With AirDrop in Mac OS X Lion, you can send files to anyone around you —  wirelessly. AirDrop doesn’t require setup or special settings. Just click the AirDrop icon in the Finder sidebar, and your Mac automatically discovers other people nearby who are using AirDrop. You’ll even see contact photos for those who are already in your Address Book. To share a file, simply drag it to someone’s name. Once accepted, the file transfers directly to the person’s Downloads folder. When you’re done with AirDrop, close the Finder and your Mac is no longer visible to others.

We’re told this works by way of WiFi, but you don’t need to be connected to a network for it to work, it’s all P2P.

Also a big change is that Server is now built in to every version of OS X.

And again, a hugely interesting aspect is that Apple is distributing this new version of OS X via the App Store. (This works via a redemption code.) Now we know why they wanted to get it out there before Lion. And yes, it’s another nail in the coffin of the compact disc. Officially, Apple says that it has decided whether or not to distribute the final version of OS X Lion this way to consumers — but my bet is that this is exactly what they’ll do, while still maintaining a limited DVD release for some.

When I asked Apple if these features are all of the major ones to expect from Lion, Apple said that yes they were, but there were a lot of other features that they haven’t gone into detail about yet. I’m sure those will start coming out any second now as developers download the preview.

Below, find the full release:

CUPERTINO, California—February 24, 2011—Apple® today released a developer preview of Mac OS® X Lion, which takes some of the best ideas from iPad™ and brings them back to the Mac® for the eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system. Lion features Mission Control, an innovative new view of everything running on your Mac; Launchpad, a new home for all your Mac apps; full screen apps that use the entire Mac display; and new Multi-Touch™ gestures. Lion also includes the Mac App Store℠, the best place to discover, install and automatically update Mac apps. The Lion preview is available to Mac Developer Program members through the Mac App Store today, and the final version of Lion will ship to customers this summer.

“The iPad has inspired a new generation of innovative features in Lion,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Developers are going to love Mission Control and Launchpad, and can now start adding great new Lion features like full screen, gestures, Versions and Auto Save to their own apps.”

Mission Control is a powerful, entirely new feature that unifies Exposé®, Dashboard, Spaces®, and full screen apps to give you a bird’s eye view of every app and window running on your Mac. With a simple swipe, your desktop zooms out to display your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full screen apps as well as your Dashboard, and allows you to instantly navigate anywhere with a click.

Launchpad makes it easier than ever to find and launch any app. With a single click, Launchpad displays all your Mac apps in a stunning full screen layout where you can launch, re-order or organize apps into folders. You can also arrange apps into multiple pages and swipe between them.

Lion brings the full screen experience that iPad users love to the Mac. With one click, your application window goes full screen, taking advantage of your Mac’s brilliant display. You can swipe from one full screen window to another and even back to your Desktop or Dashboard.

New Multi-Touch gestures and fluid animations give you a natural and intuitive way to interact with your Mac. New gestures include pinching your fingers to zoom in on a web page or image, swiping left or right to turn a page or switch between full screen apps and swiping up to enter Mission Control.

Lion also includes the Mac App Store, where you can find great new apps, buy them with your iTunes® account, and download and install them in just one step. Apps purchased from the Mac App Store are installed directly into Launchpad.

Additional features in Lion include:

a new version of Mail, with an elegant, widescreen layout inspired by the iPad; Conversations, which automatically groups related messages into one easy to read timeline; more powerful search; and support for Microsoft Exchange 2010;
AirDrop, a remarkably simple way to copy files wirelessly from one Mac to another with no setup;
Versions, which automatically saves successive versions of your document as you create it, and gives you an easy way to browse, edit and even revert to previous versions;
Resume, which conveniently brings your apps back exactly how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;
Auto Save, which automatically saves your documents as you work;
the all new FileVault, that provides high performance full disk encryption for local and external drives, and the ability to wipe data from your Mac instantaneously; and
Mac OS X Lion Server, which makes setting up a server easier than ever and adds support for managing Mac OS X Lion, iPhone®, iPad and iPod touch® devices.
Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork, and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple is reinventing the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

The iPad 2 nears! An iPad 3 is on the horizon! iPhone 5 is coming! Maybe an iPhone nano! New MacBook Pros! New iMacs! Maybe even an Apple television! Of all the Apple rumors out there right now, there’s a odd lack of talk about something we know is coming — and soon: OS X Lion.

Back in October of last year, Apple gave an official sneak peek of Lion and stated that it would launch in “summer 2011″. The first official day of summer is exactly 4 months away. And yet, Apple has been largely silent about the new OS since that preview four months ago. We now have the Mac App Store which we know will be a key ingredient, and likely points to some other things about the OS as well. But there has been no official update out of Apple about Lion. So where does it stand?

Well, first of all, from what we’re hearing, Apple is now using it internally. That they’re testing it shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s apparently being widely used internally. Recent statistics seem to confirm this. Looking over the TechCrunch logs, it seems that OS X 10.7 (Lion) has been seeing a surge of usage in recent weeks. After peaking in late August/early September, stats fell off a bit. But now they’re soaring again, indicating that full-scale internal testing is underway.

And while we already know some of the new features thanks to Apple’s preview, there are still a few surprises, apparently. One of these is a much-anticipated UI overhaul. But that means that developers are going to need to be ready when it rolls out. And along those lines, we’re hearing that a developer beta should begin soon. There’s no firm timetable for this yet, but again, we’re only 4 months away from the summer.

Apple has also been busy prepping the lastest version of OS X Snow Leopard, 10.6.7. And developers have been receiving builds of it for weeks now. But that development cycle will remain separate from the OS X 10.7 track.

Meanwhile, new MacBook Pro updates are slated for this Thursday, and that may include hardware slightly modified to run the new OS X better. These are likely to be the last hardware updates before OS X Lion hits. Bigger trackpads for better multi-touch support? A dedicated SSD element for the OS? We’ll see.

All we know for sure is that the sleeping Lion is stirring, and about to get a lot louder so it can roar this summer.

I don’t know how I missed it before, but apparently installing Twitter for Mac adds a new “Tweet” command to basically a ton of apps running in OS X. MacStories first pointed this out earlier today, and now I can’t get enough.

For example, if you’re browsing the web in Safari or Chrome, highlight a word or passage and right-click. At the bottom of the drop-down, you’ll see the “Tweet” command. Hitting it will populate a tweet for you with the highlighted section. And it works in TextEdit, iChat, Calendar, Mail, etc. If you read it, you can tweet it.

One thing I wish it did in web browser was automatically add a link as well as the text you’re highlights, but baby-steps. I have a feeling that will come.

And yes, plenty of plug-ins have had this ability for a while, but now it’s system-wide. It’s as if Twitter is now baked into OS X.

Apple has enjoyed a reputation as being virus free, something they played up with great glee during the “I’m a Mac” ad campaign. The problem is now that Apple is gaining more market share, they’ll become a more attractive target for malware and viruses. Trend Micro used last November’s 644mb patch as example, citing the size of the update and the fact that it took five months to be released.

[via Tom's Hardware]

I used to think that Android fanboys worked themselves into the biggest tizzy when you suggest their favorite device of the week may not be the absolute bee’s knees. I was wrong. Flash fanboys are much worse. They’re worse not only because they go absolutely ape-shit if you disrespect their platform, but also because at the end of the day at least Android fans have a leg to stand on. At least their object of love is ultimately pretty good and has a bright future. Flash? Yeah…

Adobe’s CTO paints a rosy picture of the platform. But that’s his job. The reality is what many of us see with our own eyes: Flash is a massive pain point in our day to day computing. If it’s not crashing our browsers left and right, it’s causing our computers to cook our thighs (or worse). If it’s not draining our batteries 33 percent faster, it’s opening gaping security holes.

Let’s look at just the most recent headlines. Yesterday, Apple released the latest OS X update, 10.6.5. A huge portion of the update was dedicated to security updates. Of those, a full 42 percent were security patches related to Flash.  Should anyone be surprised that Apple has decided to no longer bundle it with OS X?

Meanwhile, Flash is now fully baked into Google’s Chrome browser. If you read the update notes or bug reports on the various channels, you’ll see that a massive number are related to Flash.

What about Flash on other devices? It’s the killer feature of the new Samsung Galaxy Tab, right? Wrong. Even the most glowing reviews of the new tablet rip its Flash support.

Meanwhile, on the smartphone side of things, Adobe just released an update for Flash for Android likely ahead of the 2.3 roll-out. Does it fix any of the performance issues? Nope. I’m using it right now. Playback is still jittery as hell.

So you’ll forgive me if when Kevin Lynch announces all these great-sounding things about Flash that are just around the corner, I’m highly skeptical. How long have we been promised Flash on mobile devices? 5 years? It’s still not where it needs to be. Hell, it’s not where it needs to be on the desktop.

The fact of the matter is that if everything was peachy keen in the state of Flash, Adobe wouldn’t have anything to worry about. Apple could go on the offensive against them, but it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would change. But things are changing. And Adobe is scared to death.

But all of these reports across various sectors must be wrong. Flash is just great. People are screaming about how wonderful it is. It’s a pure coincidence that they all happen to be Flash developers.

[img via stock.ly]

It feels like we’re on the verge of something — “feel” being the keyword. Personal computing has more or less been the same for a few decades now. It’s the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, and the machine. With things like notebook computers, this has been altered a bit, but it’s the same basic idea. But with the rise of smartphones and now tablets, the whole concept is finally starting evolve. And it looks like OS X Lion will be a key to this transition.

On stage last week during their Back to the Mac event, Apple gave a sneak peak at some of what they have in store for the next version of OS X. Of note, CEO Steve Jobs made it very clear that it has been born out of the concept of “OS X meets iPad”. In other words, OS X meets iOS, Apple’s touch-based operating system.

Jobs also made it clear that Apple wouldn’t be creating touchscreen Macs anytime soon. Noting that these concepts “give great demo”, he also said that extensive testing over the years have proven that touching a vertical screen just isn’t ergonomically sound. Instead, Apple has committed itself to developing products that will allow them to use touch elements on the screen, without actually touching it. In their MacBooks, the multi-touch trackpads are built-in. For their desktops, the Magic Mouse and the Magic Trackpad were created to bring multi-touch to all Mac users.

Obviously, neither of those products was an accident. As we’ve noted before, Apple is ushering in an era of touch, and each of these things are key for such a transition. Now, with the features in OS X Lion, we’re going to see touch concepts fully baked into the traditional operating system for the first time.

Sure, Apple has included certain multi-touch options in OS X for some time now; first for MacBook users with multi-touch trackpads, then for Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad users. But all of these are basically tacked-on shortcuts of sorts for stuff you normally do with mouse clicks. Some of these newer OS X Lion features appear to be fully thought-out with multi-touch in mind.

As Apple VP of OS X, Craig Federighi, demoed on stage last week, to navigate new features such as full-screen apps and Mission Control, it’s no longer point & click, it’s flick and swipe. It’s a two finger flick to the left or right to travel between full-screen apps — and back to your desktop. Interestingly, it’s also now a two finger flick to the left from your desktop to get access to your desktop widgets (it would appear that they’re no longer overlaid on your actual desktop). To enter Mission Control, it’s a three finger swipe down. To get a preview of many open windows in Mission Control, it’s a two finger swipe up.

Yes, pointing and clicking can still be involved for some of this, but it seems that it’s more of the fallback now. Undoubtedly, there will be keyboard shortcuts as well, but again, as a fallback/power user option. And I can’t help but wonder if the trackpad “Tap to Click” option will become the norm one day in the not too distant future.

And as you may have noticed during his demo, Federighi had trouble a few times launching into Mission Control on the Magic Mouse. Part of that was because he was nervous, but part of that is also because while multi-touch is a nice feature on that device, the surface isn’t big enough for more advanced gestures. But the Magic Trackpad (and MacBook trackpad) is perfect for those. Remember that there are now more Mac laptop users than Mac desktop users. This trackpad multi-touch manipulation is the future.

Given the little we know about OS X Lion so far, I’m already much more excited about it than I was for OS X Snow Leopard. To me, it seems clear that Apple is going to use this new OS to begin the transition to the golden age of touch computing. I can’t wait.