How mountain lion will transform the iPad experience to the
Mac
If you own an iPad and a Mac, you get the best of both
worlds in the Apple ecosystem. However, the separation of the two Apple
operating systems is coming to a close. Apple is narrowing the gap between the
iPad iOS experience with the OS X experience of the Mac. In the near future,
the hardware you use will matter very little because the end experience will
almost be the same.
Mac OSX Lion
Let’s take a look at Apple’s road to forming the upcoming OS
X 10.8 Mountain Lion and analyze some of the features the OS will offer. First,
let’s see how Apple’s current version of the Mac operating system, OS X 10.7
Lion, influenced Apple’s decision to make Mountain Lion into what it will be
when it debuts sometime this summer. Apple recently released its third
developer preview aimed at app creators and software engineers. The word ‘app’
is another one of those things that is becoming synonymous with both Mac and
iOS software.
Lion paving the way for mountain lion’s destiny
OS X Lion was launched to the public by Apple in the summer
of 2011. The operating system paves the way for Mountain Lion and can be seen
as a bridge between iOS/Mac integration and the traditional method of Mac
computing. Many of its new features and additions have their origins in iOS,
and it was really Apple’s experiment to see how this approach would be received
by its fans. Now that Apple is convinced this is the future of computing,
Mountain Lion will further integrate ideas and features from the iPad or iOS as
a whole. Apple also took out the word ‘Mac’ from the operating system’s
title when Lion was released. This was seen as a sign of the direction the
company was taking and it is more evident with Mountain Lion’s features being
revealed.
OS X Lion was
launched to the public by Apple in the summer of 2011
According to an Ars Technica review of the OS from last
July, ‘Mac OS X had spawned iOS, and now Apple was bringing innovations from
its mobile operating system back to Mac OS X. Apple had good reason to shy away
from presenting Lion as the pinnacle that its name implies. The last two major
releases of Mac OS X were both profoundly sharped by the meteoric rise of their
younger sibling, iOS.’cc
As you can see, Apple really wanted to make a splash but the
company was conservative with its approach. In reality, iOS stole the thunder
from Mac OS revisions for quite sometime, so Lion needed to get some of that
thunder back.
The idea behind Lion is to ease the experience without
making it too streamlined or inefficient for professional Mac users. Apple
wants everyone to have an incentive to upgrade and doesn’t want multiple
operating systems existing in the market with different users bases – as is
common with Final Cut Pro and Final Cut X. in order to do this and entice users
to upgrade, Apple made the process seamless and easy. In order to upgrade from
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to OS X 10.7 Lion, head to the Mac App Store and
purchase a copy for $29.99. The download and later installation process is a
breeze. Keep in mind that the App Store also didn’t exist on the Mac until
recently and this can be seen as a further attempt to combine the best of Mac
features with the best of iOS features onto a single OS.
The idea behind
Lion is to ease the experience without making it too streamlined or inefficient
for professional Mac users.
Lion came with a full catalog of 250+ new features. Many of
these features are almost straight out of iOS. It came with a wide range of
gestures and pinches built for Macbook trackpads that resemble iOS gestures in
many ways. Lion also came with a feature called the Launchpad that allows you
to customize your apps in any way you see fit and launch them in a iOS – like
method. Launchpad is basically turning your OS X interface into the iOS
interface. You can browse Mac apps through mini screens or pages, just like on
the iPad and there are even small dots on the bottom showing you what
screen/page you are on. Customizing the iPad’s display screens is a breeze and
when you click on an app, it shakes and allows you to delete it just like on
iOS by hitting the cross toward the top. It also allows you to move apps around
and customize them into folders so you can find them easily.
Apple has also included auto save and versions for Lion
users. This means that if you working on a word processing file for instance,
the app can save your work automatically without you having to remember to save
it manually. This is the way most iOS word processing apps work, including
iWork. Apple has included this feature as an option to many apps such as Mac
iWork. Versions is a feature that automatically records previous revisions of
files or documents you were working on. This mean that if you made a mistake or
want to go back to your previous work, you can.
There are many more features that were included in Lion, but
these are really the features that let you turn your Mac into an iPad. With
that said, let’s now take a look at how Apple will further join the iPad
experience with its next OS: Mountain Lion.
