Learning how to use a simple feature last week in Apple’s new Lion operating system became almost a Zen-like moment of enlightenment for an old dyed-in-the wool PC guy like me.(canon lp-e5 battery)
My Zen master/Mac instructor was showing me how to scroll up and down a page. On every Windows PC and on pre-Lion Macs, dragging the right hand scroll bar downwards with a mouse takes you naturally down the page.
“But this was unnatural,” he insisted.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you are making a downward motion to see the text go up, he answered, and you are interacting indirectly with the content by using the scroll bar.”(sony np-bg1 battery)
A history lesson followed: when scrollbars were first used in Macs more than 25 years ago, it was partly because the machines were slow and it was taking time to render a whole document or picture as you inched your way down. Now, the whole thing is there in an instant, before you can even think of scrolling through it.
Using two fingers on the glass trackpad below the keyboard on the new MacBook Air, he showed me how to push up with my fingers to move the page up and reveal what was below it. Pushing down with two fingers, meanwhile, pushed that text out of sight and moved us to the top of the page again. When I tried it, I felt as if I was controlling a whole document with my fingers, even if I couldn’t see all of it.(Sony ccd-tr311e battery)
I could have quibbled with him that a trackpad is also indirect rather than natural – although it does mimic exactly what your fingers would do on a touchscreen – but the fact is, I soon got the hang of it. The habit of a PC lifetime had been broken and I had crossed some sort of line – Apple had convinced me that up was down and down was up.
With Lion, combined with the new Air, both introduced last week, Apple is turning things upside down in the computing world in general.(nikon en-el1 battery )
The Apps and touch gestures that have given it a lead in smartphones and tablets are now being extended to traditional computers. Where the vast majority of PC users were once unfamiliar with Apple’s Macs and operating system, anyone who has used an iPhone or an iPad will now find them that much easier to use.
The MacBook Air moved this Apple-led “post-PC” movement on considerably when it was revamped and relaunched last October. Its hardware borrowed features from the iPad – an instant-on and -off feature when the lid was open and closed, long hp pavilion dv2000 battery life including a 30-day standby feature, fast solid-state storage and a thin and light frame.
Steve Jobs was right when he described it as the future of notebooks – many Windows laptop makers have tried to emulate it and Intel is promoting a new category it calls Ultrabooks.
I thought the smaller 11.6-inch screen version of the Air was the best personal technology device I tested last yearand have been trying the 13.3-inch one with the latest improvements. The headline advance is the processor – Apple had lagged behind its rivals but the new models are up to 2.5 times faster than previous versions.
I had actually found the original Air fast enough for surfing the web and the limited video and photo editing I carried out, and would have preferred even longer toshiba pa3331u-1brs battery life this time. But this has stayed the same, at 5 hours for the 11.6-inch and 7 hours for the 13.3-inch, according to Apple’s estimates. So, I was disappointed to achieve only 3.5 hours on the 13-inch doing only surfing.
This is particularly important because the Air’s canon bp-511 battery is sealed and additional ones cannot be bolted on, unlike Sony’s Vaio Z, for example, where a toshiba satellite 4020cdt battery can be clipped to the bottom of the laptop for up to 16 hours of life.
The other new hardware additions are a Thunderbolt port for faster connectivity to a still limited number of peripheral devices and, more useful, an LED backlight for the keyboard, which comes on when an ambient light sensor notices it’s getting dark.
The new Lion software was the missing half of Apple’s Air aspirations and its features borrow again from the iPad and its iOS operating system – including an App Store, adding many more touch gestures, familiar screens full of apps, programs that run full-screen without any status bar, documents that elegantly autosave and resume exactly where you left off.(Sony dsr-200 battery)
The touch gestures can be difficult to grasp at first, but it is worth learning how to use them. I became enchanted with how I could sideswipe one-by-one through all of my full-screen apps running and, using the same trackpad gesture, swipe back through a history of all web pages opened in the Safari browser.
There are 250 new features in Lion and it can be downloaded for $US30 from the Mac App Store and shared with a whole household of Macs.(canon digital ixus 80 is charger )
For those of you still not seduced by Apple and its vision, Microsoft will introduce a touch- and tablet-influenced Windows 8 next year and perhaps, with its advances in table-top “surface” computers and its Kinect motion controller, it can still turn the tables on Apple. But, while that scrolling direction can easily be changed in Lion’s settings if you just cannot stand it, Apple’s momentum cannot be so readily reversed.
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