Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

The Mac Becomes an iPad

If you could choose only one word to describe Apple’s overarching design goal in Mac OS X Lion, there’s no doubt about what it would be: iPad. That’s right. In Lion, Apple has gone about as far as it could go in trying to turn the Mac into an iPad.

Two things made the iPad the fastest-selling electronic gadget in history. First, it’s so simple. No overlapping windows; every app runs full screen. No Save command; everything’s autosaved. No files or folders. No menus. All your apps are in one place, the Home screen. To beginners, technophobes, and even old-timers, the iPad’s software represents a refreshing decluttering of the modern computer.

The second huge iPad sales point is that multitouch screen. You operate the whole thing by touching or dragging your fingers on the glass. For example, you cycle through screens by swiping. You zoom out on a map, photo, or Web page by pinching two fingers. You rotate a photo by twisting two fingers, and so on.

So Apple thought: If simplicity and touch gestures made the iPad a megahit, why can’t we do the same for the Mac?

And it set out to bring as many of the iPad’s features and as much of its personality to your Mac as possible. Lion features like Full Screen mode, Auto Save, and Launchpad are total iPad rip-offs; if Apple hadn’t stolen these features from itself, it would surely be suing for copyright infringement.

Apple even brought over the whole multitouch thing to the Mac. No, you don’t touch the screen; you’d get screaming arm pain if you had to spend the day with your arm outstretched, manipulating tiny controls on a vertical surface 3 feet away. (The resulting ache actually has a name in the computer biz: gorilla arm.)

Instead, you use all those same iPad gestures and more, right on the surface of your laptop trackpad or (if you have Apple’s Magic Mouse) the top surface of the mouse.

All of Lion’s big-ticket new features are intended to work together. For example, suppose you’re looking at a document in full-screen view (new Lion feature #1). How are you supposed to switch to the next app? By swiping across the trackpad in the “next app” gesture (new Lion feature #2). Then you might pinch four fingers together (new Lion feature #3) to open Launchpad so you can open another program.

UP TO SPEED: What’s Missing

There are over 250 new features in Lion, by Apple’s count. A lot of it is welcome and new. (Check out “what’s new in Lion” in this book’s index.)

But some of the changes aren’t additions; they’re subtractions. A few traditional features didn’t make the cut.

So that you don’t waste time hunting for them, or to confirm that it’s not just your imagination, here’s a list of the most notable excisions:

Some are pretty big, like Front Row, the feature that turned your Mac into a living-room multimedia player, complete with a tiny remote control. Faxing is gone, too, although you might be able to buy a compatible fax modem from another company. iSync is pointless now in the age of iCloud.

Apple also removed FTP services, no doubt because it’s not a very secure protocol.

The Sidebar icons in the Finder are no longer in color; they’re all sort of washed out and monochrome, a trend in the Mac OS these days. And the tiny list-view icon of an open folder no longer looks like a tiny open folder.

Some changes are really tiny. The Digital Color Meter utility no longer converts hex colors and can no longer copy color data to the Clipboard. Image Capture has lost its ability to function as a remote-controlled Webcam or nannycam. iPhoto no longer has its own Time Machine mode for recovering lost photos. There’s no more To Do list in Mail. You can no longer zoom into a Quick Look preview.

Some of those losses might sting a little. But in the big Lion picture, you gain a lot more than you lose.

It’s a new way to work, for sure. And it’s optional. If it doesn’t float your boat, you can ignore all of it (full-screen, gestures, Launchpad, Auto Save). But you should at least make an informed decision—and this book, especially Chapter 0, should come in handy that way.

There are hundreds of other enhancements and changes, too, that even Apple doesn’t have room to mention. It’d be pointless to try to draw up a single, tidy list of every change in Lion. Instead, throughout this book, within the relevant discussions, you’ll find little blurbs like this:

Note

Lion Watch: This is how you’ll know when there’s some subtle change from the previous version(s) of Mac OS X—a good change, a bad change, or just a change.