Lions and iPhones and iCloud, oh my!

In case you missed it the Steve Jobs led keynote at Apple's annual World Wide Developer Conference was Monday and demoed the latest version of Mac OS X and iOS PLUS introduced us to Apple's latest cloud computing effort, creatively titled iCloud. Read on for my first impressions of Lion. I'll follow up with some hands on impressions of iOS 5 and iCloud tommorow!

Mac OS X Lion
The big theme for Lion is incorporating key improvements from iOS. Expanded multi-touch gestures (avialable via laptop touchpads, the Magic Touchpad peripheral and the Magic Mouse). Some gestures have been available in Snow Leopard but this will create a more common vocabulary between the desktop and mobile platforms, easing the transition for new users.

Tired of having to re-open documents and re-arrange your windows everytime you open or close an app? Worry no more in Lion! Apps will restore themselves iOS style when you close and open them, even across restarts.

Getting new Applications will be easier too, thanks to the Mac App Store, which allows iOS style download purchasing. You can actually try that now in Snow Leopard. In fact Lion will be available only as an upgrade via the Mac App Store from Snow Leopard. No more installing from disc, for better or worse.

Once you've downloaded apps you can launch them in the traditional way, locating them in the file system and double click the icon. Or you can launch them via the new Launchpad, an iOS style list of installed Applications, including iOS style folders to group them, across multiple swipe-able pages visible on the desktop at a key press (or gesture?).

So with all these iOS style features, are we seeing the slippery slope towards a completely iOS style desktop OS? No more multi-tasking, multi-window applications? No more mouse and keyboard, just touch? Some are suggesting that but I disagree. Creative professionals are one of Apple's big markets and the way they work is at odds with such a limited feature set. Steve Jobs himself has referred to the desktop OS as the truck, a specialized tool for the heavy lifting. No, while OS X and iOS may cross-pollinate, they will stay distinct.