Posts tagged Snow Lion

When Apple’s CEO and figurehead, Steve Jobs passed away this year, many feared that Apple would be left adrift without their creative leader. It is well known that Jobs himself had a firsthand role in the development of Apple’s most successful products.

“We honestly have just been sitting around for months with no idea what to do.” said Apple’s Senior VP of Industrial Design, Jony Ive this week. “But then I read the Steve Jobs biography, and it’s just full of ideas! Have you guys read it? There’s a whole part about this new kind of Apple TV, it’s amazing. And then the chapter about how to make the 15” MacBook Air work, I really couldn’t figure it out. Steve really was a unique talent in this industry.”

The book includes detailed schematics of the next three generations of the iPhone, iPod and iMac. No Mac Pro tower is detailed, but the book does specify that Apple will no longer be focusing on support for the professional market in the upcoming years. Ive continued to sing praises for the late Jobs’ biography: “It’s amazing that Steve was able to code much of OS X 10.8 Snow Lion and OS XI Brontosaurus, and it was just such a stroke of luck for us that Isaacson was able to print it all in this wonderful book. And I can’t tell you how relieved I am to be able to start some real work on the iBrain. According to the book, it’s going to be revolutionary.”

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs has been available for several months now, and includes Jobs’ favourite oatmeal cookie recipe as well as most of Apple’s banking information.

Now that Lion has been launched to huge success and universal praise, Apple has already begun teasing features for their upcoming operating system codenamed Snow Lion. The secret midnight press event was hosted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself. Here are a few highlights from keynote:

Snow Lion will introduce a new, intuitive scrolling method. Scrolling will be changed so that when users swipe down, the page will move down. When they swipe up, the image will move accordingly. In a bold move, this will also be enabled on traditional mouse scroll wheels.

Mission Control will include vertical desktops in addition to horizontal. If you find the left-right positioning of desktops convenient, you’ll love the additional up-down desktops that Apple is adding to Mission Control. It brings the groundbreaking Lion feature into the second dimension!

Resizing windows in Snow Lion streamlined to one convenient location. The bottom right corner.

Apps may no longer hog the whole screen. Apple has completely disabled the ability for any app to violently take over your entire screen. Jobs himself explains it best:

We’ve found that people today are using more applications than ever. And it’s just the worst when you’ve got your screen, and then you can only see one app. We’ve engineered Snow Lion from the ground-up around the idea that people want to see all of their beautiful applications at the same time. Even if a user accidentally resizes and application to fill their entire screen, Snow Lion is smart enough to recognize this mistake, and shrink the window down to a size that we feel is more appropriate. We call it: Smart Resize.

Snow Lion will be optimized to run on all future HP hardware. In a rare move to allow their OS to run on third party hardware, Apple announced that 10.8 Snow Lion will be compatible with all future Hewlett-Packard hardware. This will be a huge boon to HP’s future growth and should come as a very pleasant surprise to shareholders. [Editor’s Note: Since this announcement, HP has shut down production of all consumer PCs and tablets.]

What other surprises will OS X 10.8 Snow Lion bring us? We’ll just have to wait until it’s released this October to find out!