I discovered last week that Apple have updated their screen sharing in Lion. Now when going to share a screen, it asks for permission.
Even more interesting, you can opt for a virtual display and log in to your account while another user is on the machine. I haven’t checked to see how many virtual displays are supported at one time, but it’s great to see this finally available.
Lion is far more than just new user interface features. Apple have fundamentally rethought the human computer interaction at a much deeper level. There are radical changes to the nearly thirty year old document model and quite fundamental changes to the human interaction with the process model.
Applications without processes. Processes without applications. Did Lion just blow your mind?
These are very impressive, significant shifts.
If you haven’t read the Ars Technica in depth review of Lion, and you are interested in the geeky underpinnings of the changes, you owe it to yourself to read all 19 pages. John Siracusa has again written the best review out there of a new OS X release.
Lion Resume (system state autosave) just completely surprised me and surpassed my expectations.
My 2006 Mac Book Pro has a battery that has seen better days. It still holds a charge for a reasonable amount of time, but despite trying to recalibrate the System Management Controller, it will suddenly power off, rather than gracefully go to sleep while it thinks it still has some run time.
I had several apps open, including TextWrangler with never saved “Untitled” windows full of text. The laptop just turned off - no warning. Plugged in, rebooted and Lion began opening all the apps I had open and to my surprise, put all the unsaved text in my unsaved documents in TextWrangler.
And no, it wasn’t a built for Lion version. It’s version 3.5.3 from 10 Jan 2011.
I can confirm that Macs without the newer multi-touch trackpads (or an appropriate mouse) only have limited gesture support on Lion. I have a late 2006 Mac Book Pro with an early multitouch trackpad. It basically supports two finger touch but not three, so a lot of the Lion gestures are out.
I must say I’m still getting used to “natural”(!) scrolling. Great on an iPad, feels weird on a trackpad. Perhaps it’s just and adjustment period.
Booting into OS X Lion for the first time after install means spotlight reindexing all volumes. Opening Mail also triggers a full email migration to a new mail database format. This made my MacBook Pro pretty unresponsive for a while. Activity Monitor showed very little CPU utilisation, and a reasonable amount of free memory. Disk activity was clearly the culprit.
Time to disable spotlight for a while.
sudo mdutil -a -i off
To turn spotlight back on
sudo mdutil -a -i on
(Source: osxdaily.com)
Even better than saving a copy of the installer app - make a real install disk, from thumb drive or USB hard drive, or if you want slow, optical drive. The good folks at Ars Technica are on the other end of the link.
I love the way Apple are prepared to pioneer leaving the past behind. I remember the hoo- ha about Apple dropping floppy drives and the derision from PC devotees. Committing to Digital Distribution only for an OS version is apple core.
I’m out tonight, so I won’t be able to install it straight away. I wonder how big the “App Store” purchase is and if there is a way to cache the download to avoid dowloading it for every computer.
Pop goes the bandwidth,
(Source: apple.com)
