Mac OSX lion - the 8th major release of mac OSX with over 200 new features

Those of you who follow days of the geek will remember my post a while back, reviewing Mac OSX lion, and giving some of my first thoughts and impressions on the new features. Yesterday, apple announced the release of Lion at the WWDC (world wide developers conference) 2011, to a croud of around 5200 people.

Mac OSX lion includes several impressive new features, including:
launchpad - An iPad-like interface for accessing and launching your applications quickly, no matter where they're located on your system.
Mission control - an easy way to view all your open apps.
Full screen apps - the same method of viewing apps used on the iOS platform.
All new mail view - Mail now has a all new layout, similar to mail on the iPad. The new favorites bar provides quick access to your folders, search and other features, and conversation views let you browse through threads of messages quickly and easily.
Auto save - saves your documents while you work to avoid loss of data in the event of a crash. The new 'versions' feature works with auto save to allow you to recover and restore previous versions of your documents, and to move parts of documents from one version to another.
New speech voices - since mac OS 9 and earlier, apple have included a number of text-to-speech voices with the OS. The release of OS 10.5 Leopard saw a new voice, Alex, a massive improvement on the other voices. Alex has a very natural sound, and even breathes inbetween certain punctuation marks to make listening more natural. IN mac OSX Lion, apple is including a range of high quality text-to-speech voices, in 23 different languages, with more higher quality voices available to download.

For a detailed list of the new features in mac OSX Lion, see
Apple's 'what's new' article

One of the main concerns of people who wish to upgrade to lion is the way lion will be distributed. With the 10.6.6 update to Snow leopard, apple introduced the new mac App Store, enabling users to search for and download apps easily, much like the app store on the iOS platform. Apple will be distributing lion through the app store; you can go into the app store on lions release date and pay the $29.99 for the Mac OSX lion download. The upgrade downloads directly to your mac, at which point you follow the instructions to upgrade. Once you have bought lion in the app store, you can install it on all your other authorised mac computers simply by signing into the app store and re-downloading lion. However, this has it's disadvantages; those who are still running leopard (or earlier) but who have a supported mac that they wish to upgrade will first have to upgrade to snow leopard, in order to download the lion upgrade.

However, if like me you'd rather have your opperating system on a physical optical disc, see
This article
For instructions on how to burn a Lion boot disc. NOte: thsi still requires Snow Leopard, as you require the downloaded lion upgrade from the app store.

Lastly, the system requirements: Lion will require a minimum of an intel core2duo CPU to run (core i3, i5, i7, and xeon processors are of course also supported), 2 GB ram, and around 4GB space for the download. Core duo and older machines will not be officially supported, though there have been hacks to install the developer preview on these machines, and it is likely that this will be true for the final version.