14 DAY TRIAL // With Apple’s OS X Lion preview long over, new findings are making their way onto tech-blogs and forums as your usual tidbits which, put together, paint a better picture of what the operating system will be all about.
As originally rumored, Mac OS X Lion will, indeed, sport a few UI enhancements borrowed from iOS.
These include the “rubber band” elastic scrolling, disappearing scrolling bars, and (as of late) the ability to resize an application window by dragging it inwards or outwards from any corner.
Currently, Mac OS X (Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard etc.) only allows window resizing from the right-bottom corner.
A person writing over at the MacRumors forums claims to have been lucky enough to experience OS X Lion hands on, thanks to a friend inside Apple.
“I got to play around with the scroll bars because of my buddy who works at Apple, they work nicely, though hopefully they work out some of the bugs before release,” he writes.
“You can still use them like a normal scroll bar, they just disappear after a second of not being used and reappear whenever you move the mouse,” the forum poster adds.
He finally reveals: ‘ALSO you can now resize the windows from any corner, again, works nicely.”
Picked up by the MacRumors editors themselves, the story is presented with an added tidbit -
Dock enhancements.
Apparently, Mac OS X Lion will do away with the lights appearing below application icons that indicate whether an program has been launched and / or is running.
This change is major, as applications will likely use up less resources (CPU, battery life, RAM).
Apple had, in fact, confirmed the change, via two new key features mentioned during the October 20 keynote address, when Steve Jobs revealed how they were going to port some key elements from the iPad over to the Mac.