Mac OS X Lion Gets Previewed, Here’s What to Expect

The folks over at Engadget have posted a hands-on preview of the version of Mac OS X Lion that was released to developers last week. While this isn’t the final version of Lion, it does give a pretty good indication as to what we can expect when the full version is released this summer.

We already know that Apple’s making Lion a lot more iOS and iPad-like and the developer preview confirms that. The touchpad is now used for a whole slew of gestures using anywhere from one to four fingers. While it looks like many of Apple’s previous gestures such as two-finger scrolling and two-finger right click have remained, there are new uses for your digits.  Most notably, two-finger horizontal swipe can be used to navigate forward or backward in Safari and a three-finger swipe to open Mission Control.

Mission Control is another one of the new features in Lion. It gives a high-level view that essentially combines both Expose and Spaces, and Engadget thought it might be most useful to power users, unlike LaunchPad. Taken almost directly from iOS, LaunchPad gives users an easy way to view all of their apps in one place.

Lion also utilizes a Time Machine-eque system for saving and backing up files called Versions and Auto-Save. While there wasn’t much to test it on, Engadget used TextEdit and found that it saved time stamped copies of a file, much like Time Machine does with your whole system.

For more information on what’s in the not-quite-finished version of Lion, check out Engadget’s hands-on.