

New Mac OS X Lion features announced: Version Control, Instant Resume - pclark
http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/?

======
qjz
Note that what they refer to as "Versions" isn't really version control. It
would more accurately be referred to as snapshots, as it simply performs a
backup when opening a document, then an hourly backup while it's open. This is
a bit to arbitrary to be considered version control. Nonetheless, it might be
useful to undisciplined users, if the snapshots are easy to access and the
feature isn't well hidden. Also note that apps must be updated for Lion in
order to take advantage of the feature.

~~~
kaylarose
It may not be 'real' version control, but remember that huge percentage of
people have no idea that such a thing even exists. If you've ever explained
version control to a non-developer the second they actually grok what it is,
they instantly see the value.

This seems like a great way to introduce your average user to the powers of
version control.

~~~
gte910h
Hopefully it works better than XCode snapshots

------
zdw
Both of these require the application to specifically support them (per the
asterisk after the features).

I'm assuming they'll be supported by Apple's first party programs, then
sporadically by 3rd party developers, as it is with Time Machine, QuickView
and Spotlight document helpers support.

------
calloc
I found this interesting, apparently Dino A. Dai Zovi
(<http://twitter.com/dinodaizovi>) and Stefan Esser
(<http://twitter.com/i0n1c>), two security researchers (hackers) have
apparently received invitations to try out Mac OS X Lion with some strings
attached that they can't talk about the as of yet unreleased OS:

<https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40903620438269952>

<https://twitter.com/i0n1c/status/40905883584180224>

Question related to this:

<https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906705118175233>

<https://twitter.com/bertjwregeer/status/40906796650471424>

<https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/40909480342331392>

If indeed Apple is moving forward and opening up dialogue with external
researchers this is a good thing. Hopefully that means that Mac OS X Lion will
finally join the ranks of Windows 7 and Linux in having full ASLR available
and more sand-boxing of the various components so that it becomes a much more
hardened target.

~~~
X-Istence
Ha, that's me asking those questions!

Yeah, I was honestly really surprised as well that Apple is doing an outreach,
it definitely makes me extremely happy to see that Apple may finally be
getting it concerning security!

------
eggbrain
Resume is something I've wanted from an operating system for a long time.
Nothing is more frustrating than leaving your computer for an hour, only to
come back and realize updates demanded that they restart your computer and you
need to relaunch all your applications, videos, etc.

~~~
nathos
I 'verun into this on Windows XP, but never on Mac OS X. Actually, I don't
think Windows 7 forces reboots either, it just installs updates when you shut
down or restart.

~~~
overcyn
OS X definitely starts to nag if you dont update in awhile.

~~~
nathos
…but it doesn't install updates and restart your computer without permission.

~~~
chc
Unless I'm misremembering, unless you ask for detailed information about the
updates, it doesn't tell you ahead of time if it's going to ask to restart
your computer. It just says basically, "There are updates available. Do you
want them?"

~~~
catch23
you're probably misremembering -- there's a little arrow next to the update
items which require a reboot, and even after installing everything, you can
still choose to reboot later. I still have a system running Tiger so I don't
think it's changed since then.

~~~
chc
I just checked. The standard Software Update screen in 10.6 doesn't have a
list of items. It just has three buttons: "Show Details", "Not Now" and
"Install" — the list you're talking about is revealed by "Show Details." You
do still have the option to wait as long as you want to restart, though.

------
dstorrs
The primary focus here (understandably) is "we make your laptop look / work
like your iPad". Versions, AirDrop, etc are tacked on at the end and given
much less focus.

The problem with making my laptop work like an iPad is that the laptop is a
general purpose computer and the iPad is not.[1] The genius of the iPad was
that it was a specialized device built for a single purpose: consuming media
anywhere, anytime. It has long battery life, sunlight-visible screen, and does
not require mouse or keyboard. It is very good at its purpose -- you can use
it as a book reader or movie viewer while riding a bus, sitting in a park, etc
-- and it sucks for anything else (e.g. anything that requires typing more
than a few characters).

My laptop, on the other hand, was designed to be an all-up computer that could
be used anywhere that there was a flat surface, but mostly indoors. I can use
it at home, at the coffee shop, etc. It's also fine for consuming media as
long as I'm not in direct sunlight or away from power for more than a few
hours.

So. What exactly am I gaining by adding these iPad features? Sure, I bet
they're handy and I'll probably learn to use them. But I can't help but think
that a bunch of guys as talented as Apple could have produced something really
impressive in the time they took adding these iPad features.

[1] No pedantry, please.

~~~
__david__
Well, I think the ipad style of app is intriguing--they differ from a current
desktop app in a few significant ways:

    
    
      1. There's no notion of save.
      2. There's no notion of quit.
      3. There's no notion of filesystem.
    

Those are all interesting tweaks.

Having the app save things automatically and always present you with the most
up-to-date version of your document is kind of cool actually. But, you say, "I
don't want it to save my document sometimes--what if I want to experiment and
then throw away the changes?" I think that is where the new "versions" feature
fits in. It seems designed to give people exactly that. I suspect that ⌘S will
change from "Save" to "Snapshot".

Having the app suspend itself, save its state and unload at the appropriate
time is interesting too. It gives the app a sense of persistence that doesn't
exist in most desktop apps currently. I've already subconsciously switched to
this style of thinking. I like my Firefox set up to restore the windows from
last time. I do a similar thing with my Emacs so that all my buffers get saved
and restored (emacs-desktop).

I think I'd have a hard time letting go of my filesystem. I don't see anything
in Lion that seems to indicate they are moving that way. But I kind of
understand it. It'll probably start moving that direction eventually. But who
knows.

------
hallmark
The official marketing message is bring the "magic of iPad" to the desktop.
Apple knows how to ride their own wave. The glossy pictures give Grandma the
impression that the UIs will merge and everything will be better _because of
the new interface changes._

The substance behind this hype are the improvements toward ubiquitous
computing. No single improvement is revolutionary. Auto Save and Versions
means less worry about losing work. Google Spreadsheets has these. Resume is
similar to Session Manager for Firefox. It is useful for single computers now,
but will be even more handy when we move around between computers and resume
from anywhere. AirDrop and even iPad File Sharing over WebDAV on Lion Server
are efforts to integrate services like Dropbox into the core of the OS.

Management of these menial tasks and concerns fades to the background. Google
is artful in bringing such improvements to their web apps, and Apple is
beautifully skilled at integrating new functionality and paradigms into their
devices and OS platforms.

So we have saving, versioning (of sorts), resuming, and sharing. All we need
is a humongous data center to store all the data.

The writing is on the wall, just past the glossy pictures.

------
sandwiches
Full screen apps! I've been waiting for this since the DOS days.

------
FiddlerClamp
Versions and Resume look cool, but Launchpad? Do people really need a full
view of all the (dozens) of apps they have installed? I thought we were
getting away from that with Quicksilver and other 'find as you type' tools.

Launchpad seems like Program Manager from the olden days of Windows.

~~~
yan
By "we" do you mean the geeks that read HN and write code, or their typical
consumer?

I have never seen my mom type to find a file she was looking for, let alone
launch an app. Every single person I know that isn't in technology or consider
themselves technically competent uses and explores their computer solely with
the mouse. Even editing a word she just typed, my mom would leave the
keyboard, mouse over the previous word's characters, and then retype it.

~~~
joedavis512
At least it's better than pressing backspace until she gets to the word and
then typing the whole thing again. ;)

~~~
billybob
If you type pretty quickly, that can actually be faster than using the mouse.

------
goalieca
Is there any news on the invisible parts of Lion? Snow Leopard brought us
OpenCL, Clang, Grand Central, and these other cool technologies. Will we
finally have resolution independent displays??

~~~
Synaesthesia
Resolution independence - IMO that's never gonna happen. Apple will do the
pixel-doubling thing, I reckon.

Netkas has confirmed the following about Lion: (<http://netkas.org/?p=609>)

>Lion requires hardware with a Core 2 Duo processor or better. A lot of apps
are sandboxed. OpenGL 3.2 support

~~~
lurch_mojoff
OpenGL 3.2, huh? Well, I guess it's better than nothing, but had a faint hope
Apple will skip ahead to 4.0 or even 4.1. Next time around it seems.

~~~
masklinn
Intel's HD 3000 seems to only support OpenGL 3. NVidia's 320M and 330M are
likewise limited to OpenGL 3.3 (according to wikipedia, NVidia's own spec
pages only talks about 2.1[0]). I'm not sure it makes as much sense to support
that.

[0] <http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_geforce_gt_330m_us.html>

~~~
zdw
Apple has used LLVM in the past to run more advanced OpenGL implementations on
lesser hardware - their Intel 950 graphic driver was one example of this:

[http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/00649...](http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2006-August/006492.html)

Of course, this only covered vertex processing and other compute-intensive
tasks, and thus wouldn't apply to many other OpenGL features.

------
icefox
Yah it only took OS X what.. some 13 years to get what KDE has had with
"Resume". Year after year I pondered why other desktops didn't implement this.
A pretty basic and killer feature that is hard to let go once you have it.

~~~
melling
Faulting Apple for having different priorities about which features to
implement first? I used to use a a Linux (Fedora) laptop but I got tired of
opening the lid, only to find out that it didn't suspend properly. I bought a
Mac so I could run Unix and have the basic stuff "just work."

I'm still hopeful that someday the Linux community will finally produce a
polished desktop solution on par with Apple.

~~~
icefox
Same here, when I discovered that OS X was solid enough that I rarely rebooted
combined with suspend that always works the requirement to re-launch on boot
like KDE went down for me. It is still a cool feature.

------
pkamb
I'm scared of what they'll do to Exposé in Lion... they already butchered it
with the grid style in 10.6, but at least that could be undone with an easy
little hack: <http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869611>

~~~
astrange
Installing beta versions of Dock.app is highly not recommended for system
stability.

~~~
pkamb
It's fine. Using Snow Leopard's version of Expose is highly not recommended
for mental stability.

------
natep
Wow. My next computer might be a mac...

The auto-versioning got me thinking of how to do this with git. You could have
a cron job come by while you're working and if anything has changed, add and
commit it to $CURR_BRANCH/auto. Then, when you're ready to do a real commit,
you `git merge --squash`

I know that real git users commit about as often as they save, but would this
make sense as a workflow for those of us who are still used to committing only
when it works? Or would all of the autocommits make things overcomplicated?

------
pkamb
A long-time Windows advantage is finally being added: windows can be resized
from all edges and corners.

~~~
code_duck
That's also present on countless window managers for X11 (Linux, BSD).

What both Macs and Windows seem to lack is a modifier for holding to drag
windows: most X11 window managers let you hold Alt to drag windows, regardless
of where you click. That would have saved me from several situations in
Windows where the titlebar of a window is out of the viewable area, and I
therefore could not move the window.

------
kstenerud
I sure hope the auto-save "feature" can be disabled...

~~~
inaequitas
It's up to apps to implement it. But why, do you honestly think it will get in
the way anywhere besides IDEs (and maybe not even there...)? This is an honest
question because I can't really think of instances where I wouldn't want
something like this.

I'm spoiled by Notational Velocity, which saves automatically, and by iPad
apps for same. I have Coda and TextMate set to save when they lose focus so I
don't lose work...

~~~
chc
Some people actually do use a large percentage of their hard drives.

~~~
cryptoz
Those people are exceedingly rare. And I'm sure applications won't autosave
huge files; if they do there would be large performance hits. Most files that
need autosaving are basic documents, maybe pictures. 99.9% of the time
autosaving is a good idea.

If your autosave makes you run out of disk space, you're probably "doing it
wrong".

~~~
chc
It seems pretty small-minded to blame the user for "doing it wrong" because an
application used up all his hard drive space with no way to disable it. What
would "doing it right" consist of? Just not using the application at all?

~~~
tesseract
I suspect "you" in the last sentence was meant to refer to the application
developer.

------
gcr
So this version has:

\- an ubuntu netbook remix clone (OMG A SCREEN FULL OF ICONS!) but with even
more blur,

\- built-in F11 key

\- Compiz ring switching plugin

\- a trackpad, but rebranded!

\- automatic saving, but rebranded!

\- time machine, but rebranded!

\- "suspend" instead of "shut down", but rebranded!

\- thunderbird's default email layout

\- gmail's threads, but rebranded!

\- ripoff of giver (a Novell engineer's 2007 hack day project, see
<http://code.google.com/p/giver/> )

\- ripoff of LUKS

\- a "server" control panel program

Why do people pay for this?

~~~
wriq
"Why do people pay for this?"

Cause the implementation of a feature is more important than the feature
itself. Apple rarely comes up with new tech on its own. They rebrand existing
tech and work on the experience to create a product and a platform. Seriously,
who in the general public knows what LUKS is?

