The whole point of owning a computer, of course, is to run programs—or, as Apple likes to call them these days, apps. And here’s where Apple has made the biggest changes of all in Mac OS X Lion. Hope you’re sitting down.
In Lion, Apple wants programs to look and work like they do on the iPad: simply. As full-screen, autosaving worlds. You’re supposed to open them from a simple Home screen arrayed with app icons, and you’re supposed to switch among them once they’re open by swiping with your fingers on your trackpad or mouse.
This radical new vision of running programs is actually possible in Lion—sort of. The hitch is that a lot of the iPaddy features, including full-screen mode and autosaving, don’t work in pre-Lion programs. Software companies have to update their apps to add these features.
Most of them will do that, but in the meantime, you’ll go through a weird period of mixed metaphors, where some programs can do those tricks and others can’t.
In any case, this chapter covers Apple’s New Way of Running Programs, and all of its Capitalized Elements: the Mac App Store, Launchpad, Mission Control, Full Screen, Auto Save, Versions, and more.
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