In yesterday’s preview of Lion, we were shown 4 new features: fullscreen apps, Launchpad, Mission Control and the Mac App Store. In the demo Vice President of Engineering Craig Federighi offered on stage, though, we spotted some neat little touches Steve Jobs didn’t mention, but they were there.
Here’s what we’ve collected so far.
iOS scrollbars and scrolling behavior
Just like we reported, Apple is adding iOS scrollbars and “rubber-band” scrolling system to OS X. You can take a look at the scrollbars (or lack thereof) in the Mac App Store demo, and elastic scrolling at around 1:03:20 in the video. You can still see the Aqua scrollbars on the Mac App Store page on apple.com because that’s Snow Leopard.
iOS badges
Isn’t that a typical iOS unread badge we see on the Mac App Store icon? A welcome graphical change, in my opinion.
Auto save
Not really “missed”, but Steve Jobs quickly dismissed the feature by saying we all know what it is. Think about it: you’ll never need to hit the CMD+S shortcut anymore. Now I wonder if all apps will support this, or if developers will have to add some special magic to their code (Photoshop comes to mind).
New traffic lights, toolbar icons
The Mac App Store sports new “traffic lights” button and a new tabbed navigation system based on “glyphs” in the top toolbar. Those glyphs can have badges, too.
Folders
You can create folders in the Launchpad just like you do on iOS. What intrigues me, though, is that those folders aren’t exclusive to the Launchpad (as it was just a “layer”), but are the same folders you have in the Finder. If you look closer, in fact, you can see how in the last page of the Launchpad there seems to be a Utilities folder with Podcast Capture (the purple icon), Network Utility and Grapher in it. That’s the same Utilities folder that comes pre-installed with OS X.
Does this mean every folder created in the /Applications directory in the Finder can be used in the Launchpad as well? What if Apple offered the possibility to specify a custom location to load apps in the Launchpad?
iCal
It’s a blurry screenshot and the window is tiny, but it looks like iCal is getting a redesign.
iOS “Linen” background
In the Launchpad and fullscreen mode, you can see Apple has implemented the same “linen” background already seen on the iPad (in Safari, for example).
iChat is still there
Many thought the lack of an iChat icon in the Dock proved the fact that Apple killed it, but iChat is still there in the Launchpad. I think it’ll be removed eventually and replaced with FaceTime, but the app is there in the demo.
Fullscreen animation
The new fullscreen animation and navigation between pages (in Pages documents and PDFs, I assume) is a thing of beauty. Watch the video again if you missed it.
