Apple Lists 254 New Features for OS X Lion

Apple has posted a page on its OS X Lion site listing 254 new features in Mac OS X “Lion,” or OS X Lion as it is now known. When Apple showed off ten major new features in Monday’s World Wide Developer Conference keynote presentation, vice president Phil Schiller noted that there were more than 250 new features in total.

The features are broken down into 38 different categories, including the ten overall categories Apple already showed us during the keynote.

Accessibility
Address Book
AirDrop
AppleScript
Auto Save
Automator
Electronic Distribution
FaceTime
FileVault 2
Finder
Full-Screen Apps
iCal
iChat
Internet Restore and Utilities
Launchpad
Mac App Store
Mail
Mission Control
Multi-Touch Gestures
Networking
Photo Booth
Preview
Privacy
QuickTime Player
Resume
Safari
Screen Sharing
Security
Spotlight
System
System Preferences
Text
TextEdit
Time Machine
UNIX
Versions
Xsan
Other Features

The listed features include a few screenshots, though they are of reduced resolution like the images below, and they offer a broad view of everything you can expect to find in Lion when it is released in July from the Mac App Store for US$29.

In the image below you can see Mission Control, Apple’s new tool for managing applications and open windows, which are featured in the middle section of the screen, and Spaces, the virtual desktop tool for OS X, which are shown in the top row. Users can drag applications to and from different Spaces, switch between Spaces, or switch between different apps and windows in Mission Control.

Mission Control mini-image
Mission Control mini-image

In the image below, Apple is demonstrating Versions, the new document version tracking feature in Lion. Like Time Machine for system-wide backups, Versions allows users to view all of his or her saves for any particular file. The current version is on the left, while all of the saved versions are on the right, stretching out into the horizon.

With Versions, users can revert back to a previous version of a file or cut and paste between the current version and past versions.

Versions mini-image

Versions mini-image