Mac OS X Lion Adds Features from the iPhone's iOS

eatures from Apple's iOS for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad have been added to Mac OS X Lion. Like Google's Android, Hewlett-Packard's webOS, and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, Mac OS X is sharing across platforms. Along with the Mac App Store, built in to Lion, Mac OS X 10.7 supports more gestures, auto-saves files, and offers full-screen views.

Accompanying the release Thursday of new MacBook Pros, Apple unveiled a developer preview of its next Mac OS X, version 10.7 Lion. The upcoming OS adds a variety of features from Apple's iOS used on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

With Google revamping its smartphone Android OS for the tablet platform in the 3.0 Honeycomb version, Hewlett-Packard touting how its new webOS works across smartphones and tablets, and Microsoft talking about how Windows Phone 7 supports various Xbox games, operating systems that share features across device platforms are becoming a key component of the next generation of operating systems.
'A New Generation'

Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Relevant Products/Services, said the "iPad has inspired a new generation of innovative features in Lion."

Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, pointed out that, while iOS and Lion remain "fairly distinctive" from each other, Apple is moving what he called "iOS' greatest hits" to the Mac.

One of those features is the recently launched Mac App Store, which now offers one-click access to apps for the Mac, similar to the groundbreaking App Store for Apple's mobile devices. In Lion, access to the Mac App Store is built in.

With so many apps easily obtained, Greengart noted, "those apps need a place to live so they don't become buried in the Applications folder." Lion offers LaunchPad, which shows apps as they would appear on the home screen of an iOS device. And Mission Control merges Expose, Dashboard and Spaces to give an integrated overview of all apps and windows running on the Mac.

'Flourishing of Desktop Innovation'

While the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad have touch-sensitive screens, Macs do not. But the new MacBook Pros released Thursday have larger touchpads, and Greengart noted that Lion will support "a lot more gestures" for navigation and other control. Some of those gestures are currently supported in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but Lion is expected to make the interaction more akin to how Apple's mobile devices work.

Lion also supports full-screen view of applications, as in mobile devices. This allows a PDF, for instance, to be read without the visual cluttering of a menu from the app or icons in the dock.

There's also auto-save in Lion to automatically preserve changes in a file. A lock prevents saving, if you so wish, and a revert function returns to the original document. The new Mail 5 features a user-interface design that is similar to the one found in the iPad.

Greengart noted that the integration of some iOS features into Lion is "not a momentous" merging of the two, but represents "a flourishing of desktop innovation" for a platform -- laptop and desktop computers -- that "has been lagging in innovation for some time."