Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

My brother became a patent troll and he now lives under one of those billion-dollar fancy suspension bridges.

Besides large new features in Lion, there are many small changes. Check out 10 interesting and useful new things in Lion.

Lion Mail's new interface is different from previous versions of Mail. Learn how to use the three-column view. See how you can use the Favorites bar to make the mailbox column unnecessary. Learn about the Archive function and how to use keyboard shortcuts to move messages into mailboxes.

Learn the basics of Versions, a new feature in Lion that saves multiple copies of your documents as you work. Gone are the Save and Save As commands we have been used to for years. Learn how to use the new Save, Save a Version and Duplicate commands that give you a safety net while you work.

Google has launched its competitor to Facebook and with it a new iOS app, Google+. If you are using Google’s new social network, you can use the app to view your circles, upload pictures, and so on. Updates should be coming quickly to this new service and app, including an update to better support the iPad at some point. We’re still waiting for Facebook to do the same.

Apple’s launch of Lion was a success, even if everyone isn’t completely happy with it. The online distribution allowed for more than a million downloads in the first day, and millions more since. Many have been surprised at the speed of the download, while others have needed to stop by an Apple Store or borrow a faster connection.
Professional reviews of the new OS have been positive, as well as many user reviews. Some users complain of issues with the new OS, particularly when it comes to software that is no longer supported. Lion doesn’t include Rosetta, which was used by Snow Leopard and Leopard to run older PowerPC applications. Others have been caught off-guard by having an older copy of Flash that then didn’t work in Lion. The most recent version of Flash does work, but isn’t fully supported. A new version should be coming soon according to Adobe.
Lion is available now in the Mac App Store for those running Snow Leopard. Apple will be releasing a USB disk version of the OS installer next month that should allow for installation without a download and on Macs running Leopard as well.

In Lion, the user Library is hidden by default. But you can still get there easily if you need to. In Terminal, you can type open ~/Library. Or, you can hold the option key down while selecting the Go menu in the Finder. This adds the Library to that menu and you can select it.

“Well, you could always paint it white if it will make you feel better.”

Lion includes Launchpad, a new way to find and run applications. You can view the icons of all your applications quickly by running Launchpad and flipping between pages of icons similar to the Home screens on the iPad and iPhone. You can organize your icons in app folders. Apps purchased in the Mac App Store are automatically added to Launchpad. But using Launchpad is optional as you can still run applications using the Dock and other methods.

The AirDrop feature of Lion allows you to send files between Macs. It works without a shared wifi connection, but requires two Macs that have very recent wifi hardware.

Get to know the new Lion gestures. You can use a trackpad on a recent MacBook or a Magic Trackpad to navigate around in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. You can also do some gestures with a Magic Mouse. See where to enable and customize gestures.

Using gestures is the key to getting the most from Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Knowing them can make you much faster at getting to things and working with your apps. You can find them all by just looking through the System Preferences under Trackpad or Mouse.

But it can be useful to have a printout handy while trying to master them.
So MacMost has compiled a list of gestures for Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). Here they all are on a single PDF page, downloadable and printable: The MacMost Guide to Mac OS X Lion Gestures. Download it and pass it along!

Before Lion, you could drag and drop to move a file, and you could copy and paste a file from one location to another — leaving two copies of the file. But in Lion you can copy a file, and then use Command+Option+V to move the copied item to another location. The result is what you would expect from Cut and Paste, but you make the decision in the final action instead of the first one.

If you didn’t get a chance to play Sid Meier’s Pirates! on another gaming platform before, now is your chance. And if you have, you know that it is probably worth it to get this iPad version too. This is a great game that combines lots of elements and fun gameplay. You get to live the life of a pirate and chart your own course — no following a strict storyline. The game is deep with lots of new things to discover as you go along. You really get to make your own decisions and your own story, so you can play it several times.

Apple released Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” yesterday, the highly anticipated new OS with features like Mission Control, Versions, full-screen apps, AirDrop and new Mail features.
Lion is only available from the Mac App Store as a $29 download for those running the latest version of Snow Leopard. In August Apple will sell a $69 USB flash drive containing a Lion installer. Apple also updated Safari, iTunes and iWork this week for Lion compatibility. Those updates are available with Software Update or in the Mac App Store.
In addition, new MacBook Air models and new Mac mini models were introduced. Both of these lines now come with Thunderbolt ports for connecting peripherals. They both also received processor speed bumps.

“What planet have you been living on? Everyone knows not to stand in front of a store when a new Mac product comes out.”

There are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts for Mac users. There are Mission Control shortcuts, Finder shortcuts, system shortcuts, application shortcuts and more. Many you can find by just looking through the menu bar for that application. You can find system ones by looking in the System Preferences under Keyboard.

But some keyboard shortcuts are more useful than others. And some are harder to remember than others.
So MacMost has compiled a list of our top “power user” keyboard shortcuts for Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). Here they all are on a single PDF page, downloadable and printable: The MacMost Lion Power User Keyboard Shortcuts. Download it and pass it along!

Check out Mission Control, a new feature for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Mission Control combines some features of Spaces and Expose and creates a new interface in Mac OS X for navigating between apps. You can give apps their own screen and flip between screens easily.

If you have trouble reading text on your computer screen, there are lots of ways to adjust the size of text on web pages, email messages, word processing documents and other applications. You can quickly adjust text, even just temporarily with keyboard shortcuts, without changing the text itself, just how it is displayed to you.

Many iMovie users wonder why they get black bars on the sides or above and below an image that the drop into their movie. This is caused when the picture is a different aspect ratio than the video. You can use cropping in iMovie 11 to select the area of the image you want to use, and whether to include any black space around the image.