All-New Features that OS X Lion Stole Directly from the Apple iPad

Apple is planning to release their new OS X Lion operating system in the summer of 2011, but OS X Lion has a little dirty secret; it stole most of its new features from the Apple iPad. Here's how.

Launchpad

OS X Lion doesn't try to hide it's iPad-like "swagger jacking" as is evident with the new OS X Lion Launchpad feature that turns your Mac desktop and notebook into a larger iPad. Launchpad gives your Mac's screen the appearance of the iPad's Home Screen by adding a row of icons, adding folder support, allowing you to swipe between app windows, giving you the ability to reorganize your apps, and automatically adding apps to the Launchpad every time you download a new program from the Mac App Store.

Gestures and Animations

The Apple iPad got a host of new gestures with the new iOS 4.3 update and guess what? Apple is "borrowing" a few of those new gestures and animations for its OS X Lion operating system. Multi-Touch gestures make the workflow of the iPad fluid and easy and this ease of use is what Apple is going for by adding rubber-band scrolling, page and image zoom, full-screen swiping and other Multi-Touch gestures to OS X Lion.

Full-Screen Apps

The Mac graphical user interface is known to get a bit messy every now and then and Apple is going for a more "iPad-like" approach to OS X Lion by adding full-screen apps to its new operating system. IPad apps take up the entire screen and doing so in OS X Lion will help graphic designers, students, gamers, and everyday Mac users focus more on their apps and less on the clutter and distractions going on in the background.

Auto-Save

Auto-Save is one of my favorite iPad staple features gone OS X Lion. While typing, reading, editing, and pretty much doing anything on the iPad, your progress is automatically saved - unlike the Mac computers of "olden-times". OS X Lion will pretty much get rid of the chore of manually saving documents every few seconds for fear of losing all of your progress if anything unfortunate happens, by adding an Auto-Save function that will help to relieve lots of headaches in the future.

For more, read Why the IPad 2 is Apple's Version of the Netbook , Apple's Magic Trackpad: Just Another Apple Gimmick , and Expensive Tech Ep. 2: $210K MacBook Air Supreme Ice Edition

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