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Mac OS X 10.7 'Lion' Developer Preview Available
kwolf22 writes "Today Apple is offering a developer preview of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) to registered Mac developers. In addition, the Lion product page has been updated with new details. Among the updates is this exciting bit of news: Lion Server is now part of Mac OS X Lion." Adds reader Orome1: the new OS X "features Mission Control, a new view of everything running on your Mac; Launchpad, a new home for all your Mac apps; full screen apps that use the entire Mac display; and new Multi-Touch gestures. Lion also includes the Mac App Store, a place to discover, install and automatically update Mac apps."
Yes, You can download the Lion Developer Preview, but it requires the App Store App, and the process has been a little quirky. Good Luck!
Soon my Macbook Air is going to start casting spells and wanting to play D&D with me with all the "magic" it's going to allegedly have. New Prestige class?
I have to say this is the cutest changelog I ever seen. The wiki server keeps being one of my favorites.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Without any server hardware to run it on, why is there even a server setup?
Honestly killing the Xserve and not letting OSX server be installed on another vendors server hardware is brain dead.
Is it just me or does the Launchpad seem like an incredibly useless and redundant feature? It seems like commonly executed applications would be kept on the dock anyway; plus, the Applications folder is two clicks away.
Wow, like who didn't see that coming, and the death of the XServer, when the switch to Intel processors from PPC was announced?
For those who don't get it, enterprise bought the XServer because it had two bad boy (at the time) G5 processors with a 1Gz bus per processor instead of just one like Intel had. They mostly didn't care about OS X Server all that much.
Now of course Apple is now all Intel processors, so it negates the need to buy the higher priced XServer (why it was discontinued) and thus run OS X Server, thus it's now incorporated into OS X as a cost savings / hobbyist move.
I'm just wondering when the MacPro is going to be discontinued, what consumer needs 16 cores?
Without any server hardware to run it on, why is there even a server setup?
The Xserve was really not much more than a rackmount Mac Pro. OS X Server runs just fine on pretty much any Mac.
My office uses a Mac Mini Server as our main office server (our customer-facing services run on other machines). I bought a Mac Mini Server as soon as they came out and it's been running 24/7 ever since. Inexpensive, reliable and even uses less space and power than the machine it replaced.
Putting moderation advice in your
Maybe they're envisioning people buying a lot of widget-style apps.
It sure seems like it would be convenient for people like my parents.
Putting moderation advice in your
Full screen apps? Oh no! I hate when an application provides a nonstandard UI. The screen shot shows that even the menu bar is gone, which I find unacceptable for everything except media playback.
Autosave, Versions and Resume on the other hand are fantastic and long overdue. It'll be interesting to see how they implement Autosave: the easy way would be to save every x minutes, the right way would be to create a transaction log and save every action (keystroke, mouse gesture), to make sure that when you crash, every action up to the moment of the crash is preserved.
Mac OS X Server 10.6 features implied a shared Address Book and shared Calendar feature that would be useful to SOHO environments. However, trying to get it up and running is challenging. Once running, the capabilities are less than expected. I wonder if 10.7 will bear fruit towards making the Mac OS X Server platform a one-stop shop for those SOHO environments inclined to use it rather than Microsoft Server with Exchange?
Sure, just use an activation key. You will have to setup your own repo or find one that already does that. Ubuntu has such a repo used for pay for codecs and the like.
I was really looking for better SSD support. I'm an avid Mac user, I'd love my iMac to be faster, but today most of my issues are with the lack of SSD support. I'd love TRIM. Some OS integrated ability to use an SSD as a cache for spinning media would be nice -- I don't want to pay for an SSD to store my iTunes or iPhoto database, but I never want to hear the spinning media seek when I'm playing video games or using Firefox. Even file level deduplication would save me some space, but I'll admit I lust for block level without enough data to justify. Wait, did I just start listing features of ZFS after I mentioned TRIM?
It's not. Can I sell a app on a linux repository if I don't want to give it away?
Ubuntu brings this by default. You can, for example, purchase World Of Goo from the "For Purchase" Repository.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Snow Leopard already has the Mac App Store.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Has anyone else noticed that Apple seems to be using a cat theme for their X series of MacOS?
Lack of TRIM support is annoying, and hopefully it's just a feature that hasn't been announced yet. For now, you can always get a drive with a SandForce controller. In fact, this is what everyone recommends doing.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Yes, You can download the Lion Developer Preview, but it requires the App Store App, and the process has been a little quirky. Good Luck!
And you can only get it in Kenya
Bow-ties are cool.
World of Goo from the Ubuntu Software Center
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Just like in a brick and mortar store except there you can beg for shelf space and if you get it then your cut will be much smaller than the 70% Apple givers you. You can also create your own web site, maintain it, process your payments, pay transaction fees to credit card companies, etc. all the while hoping someone will come to your site - one in a billion or so. In either case you'll need to buy lot's of advertising just to get people to your site or a store willing to stock your product. Effective advertising is extremely expensive. I think 30% is pretty fair especially since you have the option to sell direct or through other retailers if you choose. Get some real world experience and see what marketing, selling and distributing really cost.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Personally, this is what I plan on doing in May, but not offering TRIM this many years after Microsoft began support is ... embarrassing.
And yet another person doesn't understand that "tithing" means giving 10%. No more, no less.
Yeah, we should round up these fools and decimate them! Then we'll be rid of them altogether!
Bow-ties are cool.
It's especially strange when you consider the Air comes with an SSD... Then again, I'm not sure who the manufacturer is.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
I thought OS X didn't 'need' trim? I believe that was something I read about here so it's sure to be incorrect.... But I use an SSD / spinning media combination in 3 Macs, two laptops and a MacPro - seems to work fine. Even iTunes is smart enough to let the music files exist somewhere else. The biggest pig I've found is Parallels as it insists on stuffing images on the main drive. Haven't really looked around to see if I can move them though.
Adobe stuff doesn't seem to mind anymore so if they can do it, anybody can.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Is that like an officially sanctioned package repo from Apple, kinda like the ones provided on any given linux distro by their respective parent organization? how innovative!
OSX doesn't 'need' TRIM, but without it, you'd better have a controller with excellent background garbage collection, or you're going to suffer performance penalties after a few weeks or months. Unless you stick with the SSD that Apple ship with, in which case I believe you're stuck with that poor performance to start with (far better than spinning media, but not as fast as competing SSDs).
And I'm not stating that OSX is so stupid that it prevents the user from manually putting data elsewhere (like iTunes' "copy to iTunes library vs leave it where it is). I'm stating that the ability to use an SSD as an additional level of cache would be a very compelling feature. Suddenly a 30GB SSD would be very useful for a large number of customers instead of a 128+ GB SSD to manually keep everything you think you might notice.
With OS X Server being rolled into the client release of 10.7 Lion, will the virtualization license that allows OS X Server to be run as a guest OS in VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop on Apple hardware be extended to the client OS? That would be a big help to developers and IT departments needing to maintain test configs and archives.
I like the green + and the zoom button before it - done right in the beginning back in the 80s. I almost NEVER need to maximize an app there are only a few apps worth doing this for and the rest are consumer toy apps / games (games always were able to go fulls screen.)
Apple guidelines and API pushed leaving zoom to act just 1 way all the time. A simple revision in the guidelines and maybe 1 option in the API could let SOME apps "smart resize" to full screen because the smart size sometimes is full screen. Option click to force full screen or force typical smart zoom depending on which way the app wants it... But to move towards windows just for the converts habits... pushes me to going more in linux.
I admit to not using the green + zoom button that much but then I usually choose to resize the window myself. As for grabbing the corner-- I don't mind that, it works just fine when I do use it- I LOVE not having borders on the windows to grab more than I would being able to resize from the sides; window borders are just that useful unless you have OCD.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Apple has always made the most overpriced kit in the industry.
That never changed really.
Although direct comparisons are a easier these days.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Bah, there's a lot more features than just the eye candy. The Lion page in the summary has a lot more newsworthy new features IMO:
Autosave:
Resume:
Airdrop:
The app and nothing but the app. On iPad, every app is displayed full screen, with no distractions, and there’s one easy way to get back to all your other apps. Mac OS X Lion does the same for your desktop. You can make a window in an app full screen with one click, switch to another app’s full-screen window with a swipe of the trackpad, and swipe back to the desktop to access your other apps — all without ever leaving the full-screen experience. Systemwide support allows third-party developers to take advantage of full-screen technology to make their apps more immersive, too. So you can concentrate on every detail of your work, or play on a grander scale than ever before.*
Still no word on decent built-in encryption. Whole disk encryption out of the box and encrypted Time Machine backups, then we're talking.
I'd rather have the OS manage the collection/scrubbing than the SSD actively monitoring the file system. The fact TRIM won't be supported on 10.6 and perhaps 10.7 is appalling. WTF Apple?
Life is not for the lazy.
I have to agree that Snow Leopard Server still doesn't deliver. I love the product and the pricing, but getting Open Directory setup right is a buggy process. And getting Address Book and Calendars to work is a mess, and also somewhat pointless since the Mail server is still pretty poor compared to Exchange or a Mac friendly alternative like Kerio.
<rant>What I just don't get is why neither Apple nor Microsoft can make a directory server that is as feature rich and works as well as Netware 5??? I mean, were there just some magical software gnomes at Novell with directory service pixie dust that is now lost forever? The more cynical take is that no one gives a shit because MS owns the business space so what they have is "good enough" and deal with it. And don't get me started on SBS. It's a steaming pile of hobbled services just waiting to crumble should one foolish person touch it's DNS settings. </rant>
The Air uses a Sandforce controller in its SSDs.
That is cheap compared with other religions where shipping an product would give you more probably a 30% cut instead of 70%.
So even if Apples cut is large, the developers cut is larger than they usually get with any other distribution channel.
Mod parent insightful
For the home user, who does not want to shell out an extra $500 for OSX Server Edition, if you want to provide consolidated backups for your family, you've got to shell out atleast $240 for a time capsule. I use my mac mini to play movies and music on my tv/stereo as well as surf the web on the TV. I use dd-wrt on an old wrt54g, and to get this one feature, I've got to either ditch the wrt54g and the non-server edition of OSX...
I'd also not pay Apple's HD tax and hook up a large drobo or jbod up to the mini via firewire...
The information that the original poster was referring to is here: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-performance-trim-in-osx/2 Even though the article is recent, the model that they tested in the Mid-2009 MB Air, not the current model. That means the controller chip is at least a 1.5 years old, and most likely is not one of the new super-modern SSD controllers. The bullet point is, "OS X needs TRIM", what you're really asking is "OS X shouldn't degrade performance of an SSD the more it's used". This apparently doesn't happen, though to be sure it'd need to be retested with a 3rd party SSD. But I certainly trust facts and figures rather than people making claims w/o anything other "well it needs TRIM". And OS X gives the users several options on where to store iTunes data, it's trivial to move that off to another partition. You can even move the entire user profile to another drive if you want to.
"Versions records the evolution of a document as you create it. Mac OS X Lion automatically creates a version of the document each time you open it and every hour while you’re working on it."
Something tells me these guys aren't too happy with the name Apple chose for that feature...
autosave and photo shop work may not be that good as the files can be big and now you have make copys and work from the copy so you work does not get F*** up by a auto save mess up. What about people who work from templates and then save the template changes to there own file name keeping the templates un changed.
So are Mac users going to get the ability to change the mouse acceleration back?
Come on Steve Jobs. I know you're holding back with this release date, but I need it now baby. I NEED IT NOW.
has anyone seen Resolution Independence or Sandboxing used in 10.5? has anyone used these? They just different advertise them.
Well, or NTFS. Everything you mentioned except the de-dup is in Win7, and has been for over a year... just sayin'
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
"All your Apps in one Place" - shouldnt that read "only the apps we (apple) deem to be runnable on your box" ?
Yeah, it's unlikely that an app compiled for one of the Debian Linux MIPS ports would work, as it's not been deemed runnable by Apple, as Apple doesn't give a damn about 1) supporting Linux binaries or 2) supporting MIPS binaries. Or were you referring to some other form of "we (apple) deem to be runnable on your box"? If the app won't run, there's not much point in having it in the Launchpad....
Interesting, written eleven years ago and still influencing the GUI development :-).
Windows 3.1 called, and it wants Program Manager back... despite the apparent name change to LaunchPad...
The fact is, any SSD worth anything should work perfectly fine without trim, and if you need trim to get it back to good performance, you should just ditch the SSD entirely. The whole "SSD's need TRIM" support was a bedtime story for gullible morons. The same morons who also bought the "SSD's need big IO and natural alignment" story that came out a couple of years before that. The fact is, SSD's had seriously buggy garbage collection. TRIM was a workaround for an SSD firmware bug, nothing less, and most definitely nothing more. Yes, yes, it can make a difference, but it's not at all the magical fairy dust that people have claimed it was. The real solution was always to just fix the performance bugs in the bad GC that SSD's did.
Apple's solution to the whole TRIM problem was to not use SSD's with badly implemented garbage collection in their computers in the first place.
Meh. What does the guy who created Linux know about computers.
Lion will have TRIM support
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/14/apple_laying_groundwork_for_trim_support_in_future_ssd_based_macs.html
10.6 came out 18 months ago.
Yes, I know. I have 10.6.6 installed on my MacBook. They haven't included TRIM with their last service pack and I seriously doubt they ever will. 10.7 may also not include support for TRIM at launch. At least there hasn't been any mention of it.
Life is not for the lazy.
I have a Mac mini. It's set up as a server, but can also function as a back-up computer in case my laptop is stolen or broken. Mac OS X Server is easier to use if you're already familiar with Macs, techie or not.
Yes, I know. I have 10.6.6 installed on my MacBook.
Which isn't 10.6
They haven't included TRIM with their last service pack and I seriously doubt they ever will. 10.7 may also not include support for TRIM at launch. At least there hasn't been any mention of it.
Google begs to differ.
http://www.google.fr/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=10.7+lion+trim&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=u0RoTY6MCoSx8QPfttWLBg
I bought a boxed copy of Snow Leopard (10.6) when it was first released. Since then, I've been keeping it updated with the latest service packs and patches as they became available. It's currently now at 10.6.6. Should a new SP get released, I'm sure that will change over to 10.6.7 and thus adding new features. I know that 10.6.6 added the market place for the first time.
Anyways, I'm not sure what you're getting at. 10.6.6 is just an updated version of 10.6.
Life is not for the lazy.
Several developers have indicated Lion does support Trim.
http://www.legitreviews.com/news/10150/
I'd like to see your achievements... fucking scumbag.
The bullet point is, "OS X needs TRIM", what you're really asking is "OS X shouldn't degrade performance of an SSD the more it's used". This apparently doesn't happen, though to be sure it'd need to be retested with a 3rd party SSD.
Except that the test you've linked to screwed it up. See, if you want to test this on SSDs you need to get them back to the pristine, empty state first - except that OS X doesn't support doing this just like it doesn't support TRIM. Instead, what bit-tech did is write zeroes to all of the drive, effectively starting their test with the drive in a heavily degraded state already. They didn't do this when testing SSDs on Windows - in that case they did correctly wipe the drive and return it to pristine condition, so they did managed to detect performance degradation.
ease of use. Backing up = plug in external disk. Click yes. Done. Take disk somewhere else = offsite backup. It really is that simple.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.