Apple OS X 10.7 Lion review

Eighteen months after Snow Leopard padded onto the scene, Apple’s latest big cat boasts more than 250 new features. Many are minor tweaks: for example, you can now pause the screensaver slideshow and search the web from Spotlight.

But Lion also brings more significant changes, beginning with improved support for multitouch gestures with animated feedback. It brings more of the flavour of iOS to MacBook users, bouncing the screen when you scroll to the bottom, for example.

Lion finally brings a full-screen application view, too, hitherto a frustrating omission from OS X. Compatible applications can be switched to full-screen with a new maximise button at the top right of the window. To create a distraction-free environment, Lion even auto-hides the menu bar.

The last major new feature is Launchpad, which acts as an alternative to the Dock. It presents your applications in the iPad grid format, complete with jiggling icons that can be switched around and dragged into folders.

These changes create a mixed impression. Full-screen mode is welcome, but it’s a shame it isn’t more pervasive – pre-Lion applications can’t be maximised, nor Finder windows, making the feature seem half-baked. It feels slightly sluggish, too, thanks to a showy animated scaling effect that can’t be disabled.

We’re equally ambivalent about extended gesture support. For MacBook and TrackPad users, the ability to switch between apps with a swipe is a boon, but it doesn’t work so well with a mouse. The proliferation of arbitrary gestures, such as three-finger swiping and two-finger scrolling, also erodes the simplicity that was once the Mac’s calling card.

Launchpad, meanwhile, does nothing that the Dock doesn’t; in fact, it does less: there’s no equivalent to Stacks, no indication of which programs are running and zero configurability. As the icons are more spaced out, it also takes more mouse work to reach them. And keyboard support is limited to switching between screens of applications.

A new approach to saving

If Lion’s headline features are a disappointment, the package is more than saved by many smaller enhancements. One such innovation is the Auto Save and versioning framework, which introduces a new way of working with documents.

Compatible applications automatically save changes to your open documents, so you no longer need to worry about saving and loading. When you open an Auto Save-aware application, it automatically resumes its last-used state, allowing you to continue working from where you left off.

The idea sounds simple, but it requires you to work in a slightly new way: for example, if you make a mistake while editing a document, you can’t just reload the file to abandon your changes.

Instead, you can take advantage of Lion’s automatic versioning. With a simple menu selection you can instantly revert to the last version of a file you manually saved, or to the last version you opened. And it’s all presented as a single file, so your folders don’t become cluttered with endless historical backups.

You can also lock files so they won’t be updated on disk, browse a file’s version history, and even paste information from an older version of a document into the current version. It takes a little getting used to, but once you get it, you’ll never want to go back to a basic versionless file system.

Little treats

Some of Lion’s features are ones we’ve been hankering for. The new Mission Control view acts as a sophisticated successor to Exposé, showing a clean, single-screen view of the dashboard, all your Spaces and a clustered view of open windows and applications. You can add and delete Spaces from here, too – a thoughtful touch.

Elsewhere, AirDrop introduces an effortless way to transfer data between Lion-equipped Macs using an automatic ad-hoc wireless connection. It’s the sort of simple yet brilliant idea for which Apple is feted, and one we hope Windows will emulate.

Time Machine can at last write backups to local storage. Finder and application windows can now be resized from any edge, not only from the bottom-right corner. And it’s finally possible to create a recovery partition for emergency OS reinstallation – just as well, since Lion is only available as a digital download from the Mac App Store.

Not every change is a success. System-wide spellchecking ought to be a boon, but Apple has chosen to implement it by replicating the simplistic (and much-ridiculed) Auto Correct feature from the iPhone and iPad. If you use a scrollwheel mouse you’ll also find the default scroll direction has been reversed – an ergonomic disaster. We turned off both features right away.

Overall, though, Lion’s new features are overwhelmingly positive – and include many additional refinements to the Finder and bundled applications. Mail, for example, gets a new widescreen-friendly layout, while Safari gains a download manager and improved stability thanks to Chrome-style process separation. File Vault can now encrypt entire disks, including external volumes. And the Migration Assistant can at last help you copy your personal files across from a Windows PC.

Split personality

With Lion, Apple clearly aims to bring the OS X experience closer to iOS. Presumably the idea is to make the platform more alluring to iPhone and iPad users, and vice versa. But the iPad-type features feel uncomfortable and bolted on. They might make sense on a future MacBook with a touchscreen and a low-power processor, but on current hardware they merely muddy the OS X interface and contribute little to usability.

Yet Lion is far from a failure. It feels every bit as snappy as Snow Leopard and, with the benefit of hundreds of small enhancements, it feels more flexible and mature than its predecessor. The Auto Save feature alone is worth the pocket-money upgrade price. And when you consider one purchase entitles you to install it on all of your authorised Macs, Lion is clearly a no-brainer for anyone running Snow Leopard (a prerequisite for upgrading).

Indeed, since Lion resolves several major gripes that have traditionally put off Windows users – including any-edge window resizing and full-screen applications – we suggest anyone curious about switching should take a look too. Lion makes the transition to the Mac platform smoother and more tempting than ever.

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