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New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

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Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#51
post #49

A long-time Windows advantage is finally being added: windows can be resized from all edges and corners.

That's also present on countless window managers for X11 (Linux, BSD).

What both Macs and Windows seem to lack is a modifier for holding to drag windows: most X11 window managers let you hold Alt to drag windows, regardless of where you click. That would have saved me from several situations in Windows where the titlebar of a window is out of the viewable area, and I therefore could not move the window.

Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#52
post #4

Yah it only took OS X what.. some 13 years to get what KDE has had with "Resume". Year after year I pondered why other desktops didn't implement this. A pretty basic and killer feature that is hard to let go once you have it.

I think it's more than just saving which programs are open in a session - based on the line "In fact, whenever you quit and relaunch an app, Resume opens it precisely the way you left it.", it's also saving program state a la iOS.

Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#53
post #2

Is there any news on the invisible parts of Lion? Snow Leopard brought us OpenCL, Clang, Grand Central, and these other cool technologies. Will we finally have resolution independent displays??

I haven't seen it mentioned, but if anyone gets official word about TRIM support, please let me know.

It's been suggested that OS X might not actually need TRIM support (for reasons not entirely understood): http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-pe...

Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#54
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "we" do you mean the geeks that read HN and write code, or their typical consumer? I have never seen my mom type to find a file she was looking for, let alone launch an app. Every single person I know that isn't in technology or consider themselves technically competent uses and explores their computer solely with the mouse. Even editing a word she just typed, my mom would leave the keyboard, mouse over the previo…

At least it's better than pressing backspace until she gets to the word and then typing the whole thing again. ;)

If you type pretty quickly, that can actually be faster than using the mouse.

Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#55

Versions and Resume look cool, but Launchpad? Do people really need a full view of all the (dozens) of apps they have installed? I thought we were getting away from that with Quicksilver and other 'find as you type' tools. Launchpad seems like Program Manager from the olden days of Windows.

From how I've seen non-powerusers manage OSX, most just throw every app they ever use (and apps they'll never use) on their dock, making it cumbersome to use. Launchpad is probably aimed at that type of user.

Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#56
post #2

Is there any news on the invisible parts of Lion? Snow Leopard brought us OpenCL, Clang, Grand Central, and these other cool technologies. Will we finally have resolution independent displays??

I haven't seen it mentioned, but if anyone gets official word about TRIM support, please let me know.

TRIM hasn't been necessary in years, and definitely not with modern SSDs. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1092456

Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#57
post #3

Note that what they refer to as "Versions" isn't really version control. It would more accurately be referred to as snapshots, as it simply performs a backup when opening a document, then an hourly backup while it's open. This is a bit to arbitrary to be considered version control. Nonetheless, it might be useful to undisciplined users, if the snapshots are easy to access and the feature isn't well hidden. Also note…

Absolutely not true version control, but if it covers everything on the HD and does so automatically, that's pretty awesome. There was an app called TimeDrawer that I was using for a while that did exactly that, and it saved me more times than I can count - "Automatic" and "Everywhere" are pretty powerful where versioning is concerned.

> if it covers everything on the HD and does so automatically, that's pretty awesome.

It doesn't. "*Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion."

Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#58
The official marketing message is bring the "magic of iPad" to the desktop. Apple knows how to ride their own wave. The glossy pictures give Grandma the impression that the UIs will merge and everything will be better because of the new interface changes.

The substance behind this hype are the improvements toward ubiquitous computing. No single improvement is revolutionary. Auto Save and Versions means less worry about losing work. Google Spreadsheets has these. Resume is similar to Session Manager for Firefox. It is useful for single computers now, but will be even more handy when we move around between computers and resume from anywhere. AirDrop and even iPad File Sharing over WebDAV on Lion Server are efforts to integrate services like Dropbox into the core of the OS.

Management of these menial tasks and concerns fades to the background. Google is artful in bringing such improvements to their web apps, and Apple is beautifully skilled at integrating new functionality and paradigms into their devices and OS platforms.

So we have saving, versioning (of sorts), resuming, and sharing. All we need is a humongous data center to store all the data.

The writing is on the wall, just past the glossy pictures.

Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#59
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not true version control, but if it covers everything on the HD and does so automatically, that's pretty awesome. There was an app called TimeDrawer that I was using for a while that did exactly that, and it saved me more times than I can count - "Automatic" and "Everywhere" are pretty powerful where versioning is concerned.

> if it covers everything on the HD and does so automatically, that's pretty awesome. It doesn't. "*Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion."

Too bad really, at first I wondered if it was versioning built into the filesystem, like VMS used to do, but more transparent. We'll just have to wait for apps to take advantage of the functionality.

Re: New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume

#60
post #37

The primary focus here (understandably) is "we make your laptop look / work like your iPad". Versions, AirDrop, etc are tacked on at the end and given much less focus. The problem with making my laptop work like an iPad is that the laptop is a general purpose computer and the iPad is not.[1] The genius of the iPad was that it was a specialized device built for a single purpose: consuming media anywhere, anytime. It h…

When Jobs unveiled Lion he said their goal was to bring some of the best aspects of iOS back to OSX. Which feature(s) do you think make the Mac less of a general purpose computer? I don't see much of a trade off here.
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