It took 6 years for the iPod to gain Wireless and more space than a Nomad. So I don't see why you are shocked about 27 years for complicated stuff like Versioning.
Am I reading this right? That Lion Server is included in the normal OS X Lion release?
That's pretty awesome if so. Means I'd be willing to fork over the cash for one of those Mac Minis to use for Calendar/Contact syncing instead of using MobileMe.
The developer program has always included the server versions.
At least it did up until they put out the iPhone developer program and didn't give the paid up Apple developers access without stumping up even more cash, which was the point where I rage-quit (would have been 2007 or 2008).
$500 -> $99. Depending on if you paid before or after the price change. Besides, $99 somethings gotta give. And all indications (atleast, recent indications) were pointing to Apple discontinuing the Server OS. Even though every version of OSX was basically server without the management tools, its good they brought the management to the desktop version.
I think another factor is that disk drives have gotten so large compared to your average *nix that it doesn't really make sense not to include everything anymore on a desktop machine. Which is not to say that stripped down versions don't still have their place, but on a machine with half or even a full terabyte standard, tossing out the kitchen sink is more work than it is worth.
Though note that the server software is a custom install option; i.e., it's not there by default.
Also note that Lion will be sold from the App Store, so physical discs (DVDs) are probably out. (They'll likely include one of those little flash drives with the new hardware with the install disk image on it.)
Block-level full disk encryption would be a huge win, eliminating dependence on PGP, which is pretty close to abandonware at Symantec (a recent 10.5 dot release corrupted PGP WDE drives, for instance). Presumably, if it's cool enough to have a brand name at Apple, it'll also gracefully handle hibernation, which no FDE currently does.
Sadly this feature comes just as SSDs are heading toward ubiquity -- whole disk encryption greatly slows down SSDs to near hard drive levels when done in software, as PGP users have learned (http://forum.pgp.com/t5/PGP-Whole-Disk-Encryption-for/PGP-WD...).
That said, some SSDs can do their own encryption in hardware, but they need OS support (via Trusted Computing Group standards) for it to be effective (storing the key within the controller would defeat the point). Hopefully this, too, will be supported under Lion. Certain versions of Windows 7 already support it.
In any case it's a very positive (if long overdue) move.
Whole drive encryption (e.g. TCG Opal) has many drawbacks. Most importantly: it's "whole drive". There's no way to segregate individual user data and still get the benefits of hardware accelerated encryption. For systems that need segregated users (or even something like an unencrypted system volume with a single encrypted user), you need to toss encryption hardware into the upstream IO pipeline for any benefit. Sticking such hardware into the drive is too restrictive, and also raises the cost of each drive.
Furthermore, many chipsets (such as Nehalem and Sandy Bridge) have integrated AES acceleration that offer significant encryption/decryption performance improvements. While encrypted reads/writes will never match the performance of standard reads/writes, Nehalem and SB very much mitigate the performance hit and will still give multi-hundred MB/s throughput on fast SSDs.
If I were Apple, I'd ignore TCG Opal and focus on distributing Nehalem and Sandy Bridge throughout the product lineup. (Or, in the case of iOS devices, toss custom ASICS on the upstream IO pipeline.) Then you can offer true encrypted user segregation (or one encrypted user and an unencrypted OS volume) while still buying standard HDDs and SDDs in bulk. Win-win.
The point of WDE isn't to do fine-grained separation of interests by security level; it's to ensure that a stolen drive yields nothing to an attacker. In a lot of settings, anything less than whole disk encryption sets a process in motion requiring formal disclosures.
Segregated users and accelerated filesystem-level encryption is all good stuff, but even with it, you still need WDE.
No, you don't. Only user data needs to be encrypted. There's no value in encrypting the OS or any apps. None. By definition, they must ship on unencrypted media. Why pay any encryption/decryption cost for information that exists unencrypted?
Assuming a perfect implementation, whole disk encryption costs money and power. Any additional logic on the drives will raise their cost (at no benefit if there's already CPU provided acceleration for the same operations) and will raise power consumption.
The biggest benefit comes from truly segregated, properly and completely encrypted user volumes, where all user-created is always encrypted with their private key at all times. Chrome OS does exactly this, and all OSs should strive to do the same. [1]
Opal solves a single use case. Flexible per-user encryption solves all cases and offers better performance.
You don't understand. You're thinking about this like a systems programmer. The problem is not that anyone cares about your OS binaries. The problem is that it is theoretically possible that customer data could have wound up in /sbin (maybe a script broke and did something stupid as root). Obviously customer data could routinely end up in /. Unless you can promise that there is no customer data in any unencrypted volume --- not assure that it is extremely unlikely, but promise --- then the assumption is going to be that the data was compromised, and stakeholder disclosure has to happen.
WDE solves that problem. If your disk is block-level encrypted and you carry your laptop around powered off, you can make an attestation-level promise that a stolen laptop didn't compromise customer data.
Along with an audit regime that makes sure it's configured properly, WDE allows you to promise that not one block of data on a device is readable without a key.
> You're thinking about this like a systems programmer.
Indeed, yes, I am. My experience in shipping systems used by tens of millions leads to that line of thinking.
> The problem is not that anyone cares about your OS binaries. The problem is that it is theoretically possible that customer data could have wound up in /sbin (maybe a script broke and did something stupid as root). Obviously customer data could routinely end up in /. Unless you can promise that there is no customer data in any unencrypted volume --- not assure that it is extremely unlikely, but promise --- then the assumption is going to be that the data was compromised, and stakeholder disclosure has to happen.
I agree 100%. No one cares about OS or app binaries, as long as those binaries can be cryptographically guaranteed to be unmodified. Given that, no one cares about them.
So, set that aside. Once that's a given, why can't you entirely isolate all user data into individual per-user containers? I can think of numerous ways that can be implemented. Chrome OS has done one such implementation themselves. Hell, union mount an encrypted per-user volume over the unencrypted OS volume. If you don't like that, find some other way. The bottom line: it's software. Implement some way to promise user data is always isolated and encrypted. It can be done and if you think it can't, you're thinking too small.
WDE guarantees one thing – whole disk encryption. That buys you nothing when one single malicious user gains access to that volume. And keep in mind: that malicious user could have been benign and even friendly to begin with.
WDE has nothing to do with malicious users and malware. You really do want a lot of things. There are a myriad of threats. For the threat of "car window cinderblocked and laptop bag stolen out of back seat", what you want is WDE.
WDE is simpler. Even if you wrote the perfect operating system or bootloader that never made a mistake, you'd still fail at the goal. User A could install a keylogger or some other kind of hardware manipulation and use that to steal user B's passphrase or spy on B.
> You really do want per-user data encryption.
What kind of situation where users don't have physical access to the machine is user-segregated on-disk data encryption necessary?
Without WDE, how can you verify that the OS and apps haven't been altered? If a laptop with WDE is left in my control for days and then returned, you know you're still safe. Without WDE, you have to completely wipe the unencrypted portion lest modified apps upload your encrypted user data once the system boots.
Arguably, all binaries comprising the OS and installed apps should be individually signed to ensure they're never modified, even by a malicious user who can access the encrypted disk.
Whole disk encryption guarantees nothing more than your disk is encrypted. On pure single-user systems that are never accessible by other users, that might be fine. The second you allow more that one user, remote or local, to access the disk, you may as well treat the disk as unencrypted. At that point, you need to rely on per-user data encryption and OS and app signature validation to prevent malicious attacks.
A couple weeks back I tried to buy a single copy of PGP from Symantec's site (as other retail versions no longer exist), and it was an unmitigated disaster (you have to call their sales people, who try to get you to buy a site license).
A bunch of folks on Twitter apparently discovered the same thing this week.
Sounds like full ASLR might be in the cards for Lion as well (which would be nice).
Still no talk about resolution independent UI or some sort of DPI scaling. I have to wonder how people are using OS X on their 27" iMacs with very high-res screens. My eyes bleed on my 17" MBP with 1920x1200 - Windows DPI scaling works quite well for the most part.
Well, working on a larger monitor eventually weans you of the obsessive need to full screen everything.
Once you get used to working with documents scattered all over, and clicking on them to move them to the front and so forth, it becomes a more productive way of working.
I'm not sure what it was about Windows that drove everyone to the full screen way of doing things. I think possibly the thing is that all windows look so similar on Windows that there was never really any visual clue about where the window you wanted had gotten to, so it made doing that style of navigation much harder.
I don't think the scaling is particularly good in Win 7. From memory it used to be better. I recently had a crack at using it, and I played around with different resolutions. Every single resolution that I tried other than the native one was blurry. Some were only a little bit blurry, but some were very blurry. I remember it being better than that (maybe I've just gotten fussier). I ended up in the native (highest) resolution because anything else was too horrible.
As br1 pointed out - scaling DPI is what Windows does and OSX doesn't - not resolution as you appear to have tested with. No LCD is going to look good at non-native resolution - what you want to do is use the native res of the display and up the DPI in Windows to 120%. Works unquestionably well for most apps if you use XP Style scaling.
That's just making the text bigger, thanks but I already know how to do this.
The other guys were talking about "scaling the DPI". Are they really the same thing? In which case, why on earth wouldn't they just say "make the text bigger"?
>I'm not sure what it was about Windows that drove everyone to the full screen way of doing things
For myself, it's because so many applications have massive amounts of chrome and tiny vertical scrolling content areas. Height is necessary. Add to that that you can drag things above / below the borders of your screen, and unnecessary borders on everything, and no shadows to show "height", and your desktop becomes a cluttered, disorganized mess with too much scrolling in almost no time.
7 fixes a lot of that. You can drag things to the top of the screen to maximize, and pull away to un-maximize. Height via transparency and shadows. And a regression to thicker-than-ever borders :\ I guess you can't have it all.
> And a regression to thicker-than-ever borders :\ I guess you can't have it all.
You can, actually - the border thickness can be adjusted in the "Window color and appearance" dialog. The setting is called "Border padding" or something like that. And before you ask - yes, it works in Aero too (dialog says otherwise).
Odd that one thing calls it "Window Color and Appearance" yet the control panel calls it "Window Color and Metrics"... the latter is more accurate, but wagh inconsistency.
My experience with 7 was that it made the clutter worse, not better, especially in the Microsoft Office programs (not part of 7 I know, but first time I'd used the most recent one coincided with the first use of 7. But I'm thinking of things like how the buttons and toolbars are laid out in the UI rather than drop shadows.
Didn't know that about dragging stuff to the top of the screen to maximise, that's a good tip, thanks.
How does Win 7 perform with multiple monitors? Good? Bad? No change?
Pretty well (I use two for work). The drag to top & bottom, and Windows + arrow keys (try it if you haven't) make for some pretty fast screen organization. You can also resize vertically to the top or bottom of the screen, and you'll make the window fill height but not width.
Not that many applications have a rational layout if you drag them across two monitors' worth of width, or restrict them to a half-screen. Especially Microsoft applications. But omg is it nice to have full-width code from two sources side-by-side... it almost makes Visual Studio bearable (though I'd vastly prefer being able to rip windows out of VS). I still keep a decent programmer's text editor handy for quick changes and better side-by-side comparisons, but it's not too bad.
I use 6 at home - it's awesome. Shortcut keys to move monitors around are great, dragging and snapping etc are awesome. Only thing missing is the multiple monitor taskbars which Ultramon provides for a fee.
I actually fear that the introduction of this 'full screen apps' feature is going to cause the death windowed usage on the Mac as well. The number of people I've wanted to slap for saying 'what's the point of having a big screen if you can't maximize your windows??'
Also Apple's multi-touch gesture demo video shows iPhone style webpage scaling in Safari on Lion, which I guess uses those APIs. But what about the rest of the UI?
That has nothing to do with these new API calls. I'm talking about retina display APIs built into NSImage and additional resolution-independence support using vector resources. All new to Lion.
Apple has updated their page on Lion with descriptions and screenshots of (all? At least all those mentioned in the linked article) its new features: http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/
How many of the coolest-sounding features like Auto-Save, Versions and Resume will require special support per application? Resume is the only one that seems doable without that; they can piggyback on the existing OS support for suspend-to-disk hibernation.
This is one of those things where having the platform vendor provide an app store (especially one that is presumed to become the dominant method of app distribution and that they've shown they're willing to "curate aggressively" when they feel like it) can allow the vendor to push forward faster - they can easily lay down the law that all apps on the Store have to support these features as appropriate by, say, 3 mos after Lion ships.
It prioritizes the platform vendor's feature desires over those of the developer or the users' direct vote, but I think it's wonderful for the industry to have at least one vendor (and one who arguably has good taste!) doing so.
I also think it's wonderful. If Apple leaves progress up to developers, you have people like Aldus inventing new things like Desktop Publishing. Then again, if Apple leaves progress up to developers who are waiting for user demand, you'd never get a Macintosh in the first place.
Nobody wanted a mouse until they were shown what you could do with a mouse and Aldus Pagemaker. Nobody wanted "undo" consistently implemented across all applications. And absolutely nobody wanted their applications to run in fully little "windows" on the screen.
From this cherry-picked example, I conclude that a good platform does allow the vendor to push certain features forward, but it also gives developers a certain amount of leeway to innovate.
That's where I think Apple doesn't have as much of a problem as many devs want them to have: they give a lot of leeway already to devs to create tons of apps that people want. C.f. the various App Stores. And when (eventually? I don't know of it happening yet) some "killer app" appears on another platform that isn't possible on Apple's platforms, they can just narrowly relax the rules to allow it.
This is why I'm happy to see both models exist and thrive. Android would look like an old Blackberry if not for Apple. And likewise Apple can pick up any advantage that Android has (other than a few, such as meeting the needs of markets outside Apple's target).
That's a great point. I'm really excited about the future of the Mac with developments like these. Hopefully the API hooks are simple enough that it's a no-brainer choice for developers to make.
From what I can figure out, Auto-Save and Versions are pretty-much built-in. Assuming an application that uses standard Cocoa approaches to document management, it just needs to declare its support for the auto-save functionality, and pretty much everything else will be handled by the system libraries. Fairly trivial.
Resume is more involved, however: the application is responsible for (de)serializing its state. Again, for a document-based application that doesn't stray far from the "recommended" path, it should be fairly simple to implement. It's just a matter of the document and UI being auto-saved on termination, which requires little work from the developer. One very interesting side-effect of the Resume feature is that it removes the need for applications to stay running: the system can silently terminate unused applications, and bring them back if they're needed again. What's really exciting about this, is that it's turning applications into something that is "always there".
Full-screen apps, auto save, versions, and resume all have an asterisk in their descriptions: available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion.
Resume looks good, and if properly coupled with Bootcamp it can be great. (think: run a Windows app from OSX, have it reboot straight into the app, and back to OSX as-it-was when you leave Windows :)
ive been fairly confused about how versions will work, im guessing applications will need to be versions aware for it to be useful, you can do it in the filesystem but without seeing the document in the application that seems kinda useless
In that video it looks like safari now auto hides the scrollbar when it's not being used (kinda like on the iphone), seems like an odd thing to do, since 20px of screen space isn't as precious on a desktop as it is on a phone.
I don't think saving the screen space is really the point.
It's more likely about reducing the amount of clutter on the screen. If you don't need something, why put it on the screen? Apple's minimalist design strikes again.
The question is how to display things like that on a desktop OS that might be used with a mouse. With a touch gesture, you touch and then move vertically as a continous action. On a mouse, you click or turn a wheel, much more discrete actions.
Edit: Aha, they addressed this: "With the new scrollbars, if all of the user’s pointing devices support both horizontal and vertical touch scrolling, the scrollbars are hidden during normal use. They will appear as an overlay on top of the window's content while the user is scrolling, and remain visible briefly to allow scrollbar dragging."
"Mac OS X Lion introduces overlay scrollbars similar to those in iOS. These scrollbars appear as an overlay on top of the window's content while the user is scrolling and remain visible briefly to allow scrollbar dragging."
Do you read that to mean that all standard Aqua scrollbars will be rendered as overlay scrollbars in Lion? My initial impression was just that the overlay version will be made available to developers. That said, some OSX apps already use them, so I'm not sure why it has been highlighted as a new feature of Lion... any thoughts?
"When you’re done with AirDrop, close *the Finder* and
your Mac is no longer visible to others."
I wonder if that's a typo and they really meant 'Finder window' instead of 'Finder'. In the current Mac OS X, you can relaunch the Finder but you can't keep it closed.
If the copy on the Lion page is accurate, then Apple is moving towards operation without the Finder, replacing it with Launchpad and Mission Control. I can see how that could work for first-time Mac users, especially those who already have an iOS device.
It reminds me of At Ease [1], an environment that hid the Finder from new users, offering something similar to Lion's Launchpad.
Ah, good ol' At Ease. The crippled app-launching interface it provided seemed to be entirely responsible for the nearly universal hatred of Apple computers by students at my high school. Compared to Windows 95, At Ease gave the impression that Macs were only capable of performing simple tasks. Everyone was thrilled when the Macs were replaced with cheap Windows machines.
Although, if Mail 5 is inspired by Mail on the iPad, it's probably more fair to say that Sparrow looks almost exactly like Mail on the iPad. Also, is that right that the developer preview is being distributed via the Mac App Store? How does that work?
I will say though, I'm looking forward to impressing potential clients with some fancy swiping at the coffee shop :)
Sparrow is faster, doesn't take up the same memory that a tab does, and it's faster to find the icon in your Dock than dig through 40 tabs, plus it's nice to be able to quickly switch between Gmail/Google Apps accounts.
I used to use this with Gmail, but switched to Sparrow a few days ago. I've been interacting with my email in a much faster and more fluid way since, which wasn't possible using Gmail/Fluid.
I use fewer site-specific browsers than I otherwise would because of memory usage, but these days many of us have 4-8 GB RAM and running one or two SSBs doesn't break the bank, so to speak.
Chrome's notification boxes have three major complaints from me:
A. They don't automatically close. (I think you can change this for each web app individually, but I would like a browser-wise setting). This wouldn't be a big issue, if not for...
B. The close button is freaking tiny. I can dismiss Growl notifications by clicking anywhere on them, which is much nicer on a laptop than trying to move to a small button.
C. The notifcation windows resemble what Apple calls panels. [1] The problem is, "Panels float above other windows and provide tools or controls that users can work with while documents are open." [2] The user isn't meant to be closing panels often, which is why the title bar can be small. Chrome's notifications feel out of place in that regard.
Is the conversation view fixed in the final release or do they still have the stupid thread view without my sent messages every other client but Gmail has?
File Sharing for iPad: Lion Server delivers wireless file sharing for iPad. Enabling WebDAV in Lion Server gives iPad users the ability to access, copy, and share documents on the server from applications such as Keynote, Numbers, and Pages.
This sounds like the OTA iOS file sync we've been waiting for.
From the article:
"Resume, which conveniently brings your apps back exactly how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;"
I really really hope they offer a "blow it away and restart from scratch" option for apps. Having to delete and reinstall apps on the iPad that have properly crashed (as in fall over, and then when restarted just crash straight away again†) is annoying.
I actually preferred the 'inferior' way of doing things back when iPad was single tasking, because hitting the home button would undo most programmer screw-ups.
†Not sure how they manage this, probably via some settings in their core data that they read in and then get borked up again each time. My theory is that removing the app and then putting it back in works because the persistent storage for that app gets reclaimed when removed.
You can force quit iOS apps. Double tap home to bring up the menu, then tap and hold the offending app icon. This will bring up the "jiggle" and a kill icon.
It does, in your case it seems Spotify utterly corrupted one of its files (since shutting it down completely and restarting it didn't suffice). There isn't much the OS can do then.
No, the GP said "Double tap the home button", which brings up the Multitasking tray. If you go into jiggle mode there, you can terminate the app. You'll see a red icon instead of the X used for uninstall.
On the multi-tasking versions of iOS, double tapping the home button brings up a strip down the bottom of the screen. You can scroll left and right, and it will show you apps that you have recently run and/or that are still running. There's no real indicator to show the difference.
If you scroll all the way to the left, you get a bunch of music options, and the screen orientation lock, which is quite useful since they decided to remove that function from the hardware switch.
Now, while that bar is showing, you can press and hold one of those recently run apps, and it will jiggle and you can force quit it by pressing the x in the corner, very much like removing the app. As far as I know the force quit through this method is the same as the one with the power button and home key thing (maybe a bit faster).
Where your technique comes in handy is that the list of recently run apps does not include the currently frontmost or 'runningest' app or whatever it is. So you can't quit an app while you're in that app using the ribbon technique.
Snow Leopard (and probably earlier) already support this. When an app reopens twice after from the "reopen" button on the crash reporter it opens without loading the preference file.
Looks like that's gonna be the case. Finder in 10.7 apparently hides $HOME/Library/, so you will have to bust out the terminal to remove b0rken settings.
Good tip! I use this constantly in File Open dialogs (especially to get into hidden .folders). Also worthy of mention is that you can actually tab-complete paths in the dialog just like in the terminal.
Netkas has confirmed the following about Lion:
>Lion requires hardware with a Core 2 Duo processor or better.
A lot of apps are sandboxed.
OpenGL 3.2 support
I'm happy about the OpenGL 3.2 support. But what about 4?
Also, what's AV Foundation? Is this what QuicktimeX was supposed to become? Will we finally get codec plugins without having to program for the crusty old Component Manager?
Tried it briefly, but Dropbox won't even install on it. In addition, Evernote doesn't work (it seems to be relying on a private API that doesn't exist anymore) and NewsRack sync with Google Reader is completely hosed due to a memory leak that I'm assuming is a problem on 10.7 (but not 10.6 for some reason). Needless to say, I'm going back to Snow Leopard for now, since Dropbox is a vital tool for me.
Anyone else catch the new power key to the right of the eject key on what looks like the 13"? Maybe I'm slow, but I was pretty sure the last generation still had a circular power button - is this from today's update on the machines?
Scroll down to "Gestures and Animations"
http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/
Full-screen apps, increased emphasis on gestures, an app store... looks like they're trying to add an iOS feel to the user experience (at least within apps that use the new features).
Although it's worth noting that Apple sometimes has a very weird definition of "Gold Master". The latest Xcode 4 GM, for example, is pretty much just another beta version. It's not production ready at all.
iOS GMs have always been ready to ship, minus a few 3rd-party apps and last minute exploits(JBs). If they are throwing GM designator on anything that isn't usable than I'm severely disappointed.
In other words, Apple has finally brought the key features of Lisa OS to the Mac. It took a little longer than expected.