Upgrades to operating systems always seem to make me nervous. Maybe it’s years of flashbacks to my days with Windows, but I admit I was a little shell shocked about downloading Apple’s latest OS. Perhaps it was the way Apple delivered this beast of an upgrade that put me and many others at ease.
First, it’s $29.00! What….yes….$29.00 and I don’t mean $29.00 for each Mac you own. This price tag will cover the install over all my Macs. Second, they delivered it through the App Store. No more discs, no more waiting for the mail and tracking my delivery via FedEx like a hungry predator. I woke up, opened up the App Store and there it was…practically begging me to click install. Trust me, I heard the voices and they sounded like James Earl Jones. And finally, no prep required. Just download and install. No need to backup anything (but that’s a risk I assumed), no transferring of files and certainly no need for additional drivers and such. The only drawback to my plan was the fact that it downloaded at only 1 Mbit per second (nearly 7 1/2 hours)….through no fault of the App Store. Just a fact of where I was at the time. Despite the day-long download process, I am thoroughly impressed and overly satisfied with this upgrade. There is a bit of a steep learning curve to gaining access to all the goodies, but it’s a stark improvement. Here are a few of the things I currently enjoy about Apple’s OS X Lion.
Mail: Completely redone and looks amazing! Acts more like mail on the iPhone and iPad. I love that it tracks previous conversations and the search capabilities are powerful!
Address Book: Absolutely beautiful! Looks and feels like a real address book. Also gives you the capability to make Face Time calls from your contacts. Even lets you take photos or import photos for your contacts.
Calendar: Major updates! Full year view with a heat map, highlighting your busy times throughout the month. You can finally increase and decrease the size of the font by holding down Command and (+ or -). Quick event entry works like Google calendar and the daily view is now more user friendly for the incorporation of lists.
Mission Control and Launch Pad: The Mission Control feature allows you to quickly view all the apps you have open…think expose and spaces merged together in a way that is far more effective. Activate it with a simple gesture. Launch Pad gives you the ability to launch your apps in a familiar fashion like you can on your iPad and iPhone. You can create folders and move them around in any order you wish.
Gestures: Tons of new gestures to learn and this will take me a little bit of repetition before I got them all down and committed to memory. You can see demos of them all by going to your System Preferences (Trackpad) setup. They all work great and I will be relying on them frequently.
I could go on and on…much like I already have, but visit Apple’s website to grasp the some 250+ changes/updates they’ve made to this operating system. This was a major update that I already love and no one comes close to the price tag of $29.00. This Lion has certainly earned the right to be called the King of the Jungle!
