October 20th, 2010. Steve Jobs hosts Back to Mac, an Apple press conference. During the conference, he mentions all sorts of things like iLife ’11 and some things about that Macbook Air thing that nobody cares about, but he also mentioned OSX Lion, the newest addition.

-Mac App Store-

Just like the iPhone and iPad, the Mac will be getting it’s own app store. During the demonstration, it looks exactly like the regular old app store, only with computer programs. For demonstration purchases, Pages was downloaded and installed using only the app store. When Craig (the guy doing the demonstration) pressed the download button, the pages icon jumped down into the dock, and download/installed very quickly. The mac app store sorts all the apps, just like before.

 

-Multitouch-

Steve Jobs quickly touches on Multitouch screens and pads, and how multitouch screens are annoying because of how you need to have your hand up, nothing to special.

 

-Launchpad-

Also like the iPhone and iPad, Lion will be getting a launch pad, a screen with icons only, and you just click on one to open the app. The demonstration shows off how the icons fade in from the background, and then fade out when you select one. You can also use a multitouch gesture to go to different pages, and organize the icons and stuff. The only issue is that the page switching gesture looks REALLY awkward and inconvenient.

 

-Mission Control-

So apple has these four things now, Exposee, Fullscreen apps (which was mentioned earlier, but not enough to be noteworthy), the dashboard, and Spaces. Mission Control combines all four of those into one screen. Mission control looks like Exposee, only now it groups all the windows with those of the same app. Basically, if you have two safari windows open, they will group together, and a Firefox page will be grouped with the firefox pages, etc etc. The apps you have open appear on the top of the screen, and just like some apps from iPhone/iPad, they are exactly how they were when you got out of them. If you have a lot of safari windows up, and you need to see which one you wanted, you can select the whole safari group of windows, and then look through them so that you click on the right one. And as always, the dock is there on the bottom.

 

Overall, Mac OSX Lion looks like a big step in the right direction. Although many of the updates are just small ones, they all come together to make something good. And I am usually against everything Apple does, so I don’t normally give out congradulations to them.