Apple Mac OS X Lion review

Apple is often accused of putting style ahead of substance, but sometimes the way a product looks and feels can be an important part of how it works. Apple's Time Machine is a good example of this.

As a piece of back-up software it's actually quite limited, yet it has that eye-catching 'starscape' interface that manages to make the tedious task of file backup seem somehow glamorous. As a result, Time Machine actually encourages people to use it in a way that no other backup program is ever likely to do.

And so it is with Lion, the latest major release of Apple's OS X operating system. During the demo session at Apple's London HQ I found myself feeling rather unimpressed by the new features that were being unveiled.

After all, multi-touch gestures have been around in OS X for a quite while, so merely adding a few more finger-tangling gestures didn't seem like much of a big deal. The new Mission Control feature simply seemed like a prettier version of the existing 'Spaces', and LaunchPad - well, I couldn't quite see the point of LaunchPad at all.

Even so, after a few days of using Lion - or OS X v. 10.7 as it's officially called - I found that I really rather like it. The ability to step backwards and forwards through a series of web pages simply by swiping your fingers left or right across the trackpad is really rather neat.

It's practical, but it's all the more effective because of Apple's attention to detail. The animation as pages flick across the screen is so smooth that it really makes the Mac feel more responsive - as though the trackpad were an extension of your fingers (assuming, of course, that your Mac actually has a trackpad).

Some of those new multi-touch gestures do feel a bit clumsy at first; the idea of a three-finger swipe initially reminded me of the old 'three finger salute' on Windows (Ctrl-Alt-Delete).

However, it really is rather satisfying when you flick your fingers up on the trackpad to activate the Mission Control feature and then just watch an entire screen full of overlapping programs and windows neatly reorganise themselves in an instant.

Mission Control is another example of a feature that succeeds through sheer style. It merges two existing features: Expose, which shows the window associated with the currently open application, and the Spaces feature that allows you to create custom workspaces containing specific sets of apps.

The result is a slick, tidy overview of your Mac desktop that makes it easy to locate the specific document or window you're looking for on even the most cluttered of desktops.

Sometimes, though, Apple's penchant for eye-candy does get a bit out of control. The LaunchPad feature that displays all your currently installed programs on a single screen simply seems like a misguided attempt to make the Mac look more like the iPad, while the new full-screen viewing mode really only benefits programs such as iPhoto, where you can use it as a kind of slide show presentation tool.

However, once you start to edit your work in an application you'll probably soon find yourself switching back to windowed mode so that you can reach the various menus and tool palettes once more.

In among all this eye-candy there's one significant new set of features that really will change the way you work with applications in the future. The new Auto-Save feature is self-explanatory - documents are automatically saved every five minutes, but also in those little pauses when most Mac users would instinctively hit Command-S as a precaution to save their work.

The logical consequence of this is that programs no longer ask whether you want to save your documents before you quit. Now they just quit straight away, and when you launch them again they resume as they were, with exactly the same set of documents and windows open as before (although this default 'resume' option can be turned off if you prefer).

Us old-timers can still carry on hitting Command-S, though, as that now becomes the command to save a 'version' of your document. The new Versions feature is effectively Time Machine back-up for individual documents, allowing you to step back through the document history and view all the different versions it has gone through.

Any magazine designer who's gone through a series of different page layouts will love that option - the only minor drawback here that is developers will need to update their applications in order to use the Auto-Save, Resume and Versions features.

Sadly, this OS update also says goodbye to one key feature: the Rosetta software that allowed old PowerPC programs to run on Intel processors. My now-ancient copy of Photoshop won't run anymore, and quite a few other programs and utilities will be thrown onto the scrap heap too.

Lion doesn't simply discard the PowerPC architecture, either. It won't run on anything less than a Core 2 Duo processor, which means that even some Intel-based Mac models are being left behind.

Apple is saying goodbye to software on disks too, as Lion is available only as a download from the App Store. There's no option to buy it on DVD, which may worry anyone who still wants a bootable DVD for emergencies. However, the installer program does at least create a recovery partition that will perform the same function if necessary.

In some ways Lion is an odd upgrade, as it doesn't rely on the obligatory long list of new features to make an impact. There are some genuine advances - the new Auto-Save and Versions features really change the way that applications work, and in about six months' time we'll probably wonder how we ever did without them.

However, features such as Mission Control and the new multi-touch gestures are really just a refinement of the Mac's existing interface design. But then the Mac's interface has always been its strong point and, by making the Mac even more fluid and responsive, Lion should appeal to existing Mac users and to the new converts that Apple hopes to bring over from the iPhone and iPad.