14 DAY TRIAL // Sources with access to the necessary logs claim to have determined a surge of usage in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which indicates that Apple is now using it internally.
According to the source in question, the revised desktop OS is apparently being widely used, as Apple needs to have everything prepped and ready to ship in four months from now.
While Apple did give fans a sneak peek of Lion at last year’s Back to the Mac event, some of the major changes were intentionally left out.
One of those is a major UI overhaul, which many anticipated, but now we may have gotten the first glimpse of what it really looks like.
A purported Mac OS X Lion screenshot has been doing the rounds lately. Its leaker claims to have obtained it from a friend who works for a mysterious company.
He also said that this ‘friend’ knows “they've been working on a new interface—and this is one of the options,” he noted, referring to the image above.
In other words, it’s one of the ‘modes’ Mac OS X Lion works in.
“It includes a new dock (the one in the picture) that has a default auto-hide function, an ‘opaque’ effect in the back, and a new bar with direct access to LaunchPad,” this person explained, based on what he was told by the original source.
He also reveals that the icons located on the right side of the screen are hidden until the user puts the mouse cursor over.
Another notable change includes an enhancement to the window system, which acts like a pop-up effect. The whole user interface is said to be darker now.
Mac OS X Lion is scheduled to debut in summer 2011. The official introduction is expected to occur at San Francisco’s Moscone Center during Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.