Apple's Jobs to unveil 'Lion' operating system
CEO returns
Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs will return from sick leave to unveil Apple's latest generation of software next week, the iPhone and iPad manufacturer said.
Jobs, Apple's co-founder, will unveil Apple's new operating system, dubbed "Lion," at a developers conference in San Francisco on June 6. The Lion is the eighth major release of Mac OS X.
Aside from the Lion, Jobs will also present iOS 5, the next version of Apple's advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; and iCloud, Apple's upcoming cloud services offering.
The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on June 6 to 10 showcases the latest innovations and the newest technologies in iOS and Mac OS X. Over 1,000 Apple engineers will hold in-depth technical sessions and hands-on labs that demonstrate how to harness the incredible power of the world's most advanced operating systems into the apps on the iPad and iPhone.
Jobs, 56, went on medical leave in January, his third since 2004. He underwent an operation for pancreatic cancer in 2004 and received a liver transplant in 2009. Jobs made an appearance at the iPad 2 launch event in March this year.
The Lion, which Apple says has the power of Mac OS X and the magic of iPad, will be available in the summer of 2011.
The Lion has these features:
* Mac App Store - offers millions of customers in over 90 countries can quickly and easily select from some of the best Mac apps conveniently on their Mac.
* Launchpad - gives users instant access to apps - iPad style.
* Full Screen -- like on an iPad, Mac OS X Lion displays every app full screen, with no distractions, and there's one easy way to get back to other apps.
* Mission Control - provides a powerful and handy new feature that provides you with a comprehensive look at what's running on your Mac.
* Aqua look and feel - takes users' experience to a new level with popovers, overlay scrollbars, and powerful Multi-Touch gestures and animations.
* Gestures and animations - The fluid, responsive animations that create the magical user experience on iPad and iPhone are available in Mac OS X Lion.
* AV Foundation - a framework that provides essential services for working with time-based audiovisual media.
* Auto save -- if you have a document-based application, Lion offers an efficient, built-in auto save feature that stores changes to the working document instead of creating additional copies on a disk.
* Resume in Lion - allows users to restore app exactly where they were prior to logging out or restarting.
* Sandboxing - protects the system by limiting the kinds of things an application can do, such as accessing files on disk or resources over the network.
* File Coordination - helps eliminate inconsistencies due to overlapping reads and writes by allowing your application to access files and directories in a way that is serialized with respect to other processes' accesses of the same files and directories.