Mac OS X Lion Preview: New features, orphans first-gen Intel machines

On its developer page, Apple highlights a few new features in Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion. However, in the release notes, a few more details of interest emerge, including Lion Server; a Recovery HD option, which will replace the Installation DVD; and the orphaning of the first generation of Intel machines.

On Apple's Lion page, the company said Lion server will be offered to all users.

Lion Server delivers wireless file sharing for iPad. Enabling WebDAV in Lion Server gives iPad users the ability to access, copy, and share documents on the server from applications such as Keynote, Numbers, and Pages.

On the Apple's developer site, the company points to future features such as Full Screen Apps, a way that developers can present their apps like an iPad.

Provide an immersive, focused user experience with a full screen app. NSApplication, NSWindow, and the NSWindowDelegate Protocol in Mac OS X Lion make it easy for you to create and manage full-screen user interfaces while providing you the power to design rich user interactions

There will be new capabilities in the Aqua interface, including popovers, overlay scrollbars, and "powerful Multi-Touch gestures and animations."

Popovers AppKit framework now includes popovers, a new unit of content that can be positioned relative to other content on the screen. Popovers automatically move whenever the positioning view moves. You can also design popovers that can be detached, allowing them to become a separate window.

Overlay Scrollbars Mac OS X Lion introduces overlay scrollbars similar to those in iOS. These scrollbars appear as an overlay on top of the window's content while the user is scrolling and remain visible briefly to allow scrollbar dragging.

Multi-Touch Gestures and Animations The fluid, responsive animations that create the magical user experience on iPad and iPhone are available in Mac OS X Lion. Design your apps to use Multi-Touch gestures and animations and redefine the interaction users have with your apps.

In addition, Lion will offer a built-in auto-save feature for applications,  which will store changes rather than simply making copies of the whole document. It will provide users with a Time Machine-like interface to track the changes.

And then there's Resume, which is another iOS "innovation." Users can return to an application in the state they where when the app was last running. This would happen even after users log out or restart.

Lion will improve security via Sandboxing and Privilege Separation.

Create apps that are more secure with app sandboxing and privilege separation. Sandboxing protects the system by limiting the kinds of things an application can do, such as accessing files on disk or resources over the network. Limiting the capabilities of an app to just those operations that it needs to perform helps keep the rest of the system more secure in the event that an app is compromised. Privilege separation is another common technique for improving security where an app is factored into smaller pieces, each with their own distinct roles and privileges.

Meanwhile, the Preview notes show that Lion will require a Mac with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better. This orphans the first release of Macs with Intel chips during the first half of 2006, although customers may have purchased these machines throughout the rest of the year.

Here's the list of the orphaned models at EveryMac.com.