1. It will be called “Lion”

Don’t laugh. It might be just a name, but it tells us a lot about the product.
First, it’s a clear cut from the previous OS X versions. Unlike “Snow Leopard”, which was a stripped down, polished and accelerated version of “Leopard”, “Lion” is destined to be something completely new.
They could have chosen another cat. Frankly, even OSX “Simba” sounds better than “Lion”. What about Lynx, Cougar, or even Clouded Leopard? But the Lion is after all the king of the jungle, which indicates that Apple is aiming high.
Snow Leopard is an excellent system, but Apple was resting on their laurels lately. Now that Windows and Ubuntu are slowly catching up, it’s time for some real change.

2. It will feature a redesigned UI

OS X has seen some small but significant UI design improvements along the years. The main theme, Aqua, now features a sleek gradient instead of the brushed metal featured in the previous OS X versions, but even a gradient can get old.
Newer apps, like AppZapper, Transmit or the CS5 suite have demonstrated new kinds of UI designs, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple change the way OS X looks.
Of course, when it comes to Apple, I’m always open to surprises, but the new UI is probably going to look like the one Quicktime X is using: dark, elegant and sleek.

3. Performance, performance, performance

Performance is like iOS apps, you can never get enough. Newer technologies allow more efficient coding, newer processors allow better multi-threading and multitasking.
But to be honest, OS X 10.6 is already bloody fast. So what could be improved? 3D performance is the answer. As it turns out, one of the largest gaming companies has recently opened its doors to Mac, and this will probably play a major role in OS X 10.7′s handling of heavy 3D graphics, or at least we shall hope so. I want to play Crysis on my MacBook!

4. Multitouch

Multitouch is at the core of Apple’s mobile technology, and it has already found its way to the Macintosh line: the truly phenomenal glass trackpad on unibody MacBook Pros and the Magic Trackpad rely on multitouch gestures to make the OS X experience so smooth.
More, deeper, and better multitouch integration is bound to be integrated to OS X in some way or another, be it thanks to hybrid MacBooks (A MacBook Air made of an iPad with a keyboard?) or simply gigantic multitouch surfaces on Cinema Displays.
Regardless of the way multitouch is used in OS X, one can safely state that the UI will have  a major impact here.

5. The cloud

I’m not a huge fan of the cloud. I like having my media on my own hard drives. But regardless of personal preferences, the fact remains that cloud storage becomes cheaper faster than physical storage does. Cloud apps becomes increasingly popular, and with the slow adoption of HTML5, they will be able to match desktop apps.
Apple knows that, and I would not be surprised to see their MobileMe scam being transformed into something actually quite usable. iTunes will, eventually, work like Spotify.

… And surprises

I recently ranted on and about Apple’s increasingly boring predictability. OS X Lion is the perfect occasion for Steve Jobs to rise back to his own standards and surprise the world with something revolutionary, something that we, mere mortals, simply can’t imagine.
October 20th will also probably be the day that iLife ’10 get’s unveiled, and maybe, who knows, some new hardware.
Any specific feature you’d like to see in OS X 10.7? Let us know in the comments.

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The user interface

Whether you like it or not, the UI is the first thing you’ll notice in a new app. It’s a good thing that first impressions are important, because Transmit’s new interface is absolutely gorgeous. Panic is well know for their sleek UIs – some elements of Coda, one of their other apps, have been implemented in Snow Leopard by Apple, which says a lot – but this time they’ve really outdone themselves. Believe me, I spent a while trying to find something negative to say about the design, but I honestly can’t find anything. The buttons, the shadows, the gradients, the icons, every little detail is gorgeous, every pixel is where it should be. I’ve tried resizing the window, something that usually throws the design equilibrium of an app out of whack, but the user interface is just too good. Screen real estate is fully used, there’s information everywhere, but it’s still very readable and balanced. It’s not eye candy for the sake of beautiful pixels – well, a little – but for the sake of interactivity and usability: you’ll quickly notice that everything in this app has a function.

The workflow

The best user interface is useless if the workflow isn’t any good. The beauty of Transmit is that workflow and UI are so closely linked that the UI’s sleekness is reflected in the way you use the app.
For instance, favorites and bookmarks are nothing new in FTP clients, but there’s something about Transmit 4 that just makes you want to keep everything organized and tidy. It keeps iDisk locations, bonjour locations, automatically catalogs your history, and has folders for bookmarks. You can either rapidly add bookmarks right from the favorites screen, or add them as and when you’re connected to your servers. These favorites will even automatically sync over MobileMe, keeping Transmit on all your Macs updated with the same data.

Once you’re connected to your server, you can get to work, and nothing will distract you from your task. The right pane shows you local files, and the left pane shows your remote documents on the server. Tab bars on top of both panes indicate your current folder in each location. Click the little toggle switch and it immediately switches the view to a remote or local location in either pane, making the UI extremely versatile. You can even be browsing two different FTP locations and transfer files to and from them without having to bring them down to a local folder, thanks to Transmit’s user transparent temp folder. Beautiful. Transmit 4 allows you to connect to FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, and WebDAV servers.

The new features

• Sync is a great addition to Transmit. You choose which direction of the synchronization flow and run through easy to understand settings like whether you want to delete orphaned destination files, how to determine if a file has changed, among others. At the bottom, Transmit will display a beautiful speech bubble, reading out in layman’s words what’s going to happen to your files once you do synchronize. If you want to be extra cautious, you can even simulate the sync.
• Disk mounting allows you to mount a server location on your computer’s desktop. This basically means that you can browse your server just as if it were a hard drive on your computer, even after quitting Transmit!
• Places are basically shortcuts to different folders within the same FTP location. This is really handy of you host more than one website on your server or use sandboxes. Add to this the ability to use both panes for the same FTP location, and it’s usability heaven.
• And much, much more: It’s been a long 5 years since Transmit 3 came out, and Panic has packed this release with new features. At its core, Transmit is now 64-bit. Panic also says that they’ve rewritten and fine tuned the FTP engine to make it scream, and trust me, it feels just crazy fast. Uploading, on my 2000 kb/s connection, is about 6x times faster than on Transmit 3 or any other FTP client. There’s also many more view options, including the famed Cover Flow and Quick Look support. And, if you choose to do so, you have have folders show up above files in a list. Last but not least, there’s a throttler, which was one of the big drawbacks of Transmit 3.

Verdict

This software is beautiful, polished, useful, oh, and did I mention beautiful? It’s also very stable. I haven’t had a single crash with the beta, and the 4.0 version is just as smooth-running. Transmit is the best FTP client in the world, all platforms included. I mean, what other FTP client do you know that gets people exited? I am quite sure some people will get themselves a website just to try that baby out. This kind of software is quite unique to the Mac platform: Transmit has a style that would just not be present if it had been created by a vast open source community or large developer studio belonging to Microsoft. No, there are only a handful of developers behind this app, and they have a recognizable feel for aesthetics and usability. Trust me, once you’ve used a Panic app, you’ll recognize a Panic app.
It’s also this kind of software that will ensure that I will never look back to Linux or Windows. Mac apps have something about them; I don’t know if it’s the way they are designed and polished till they shine, but even Transmit’s website is a little gem of webdesign.
Take Billings, Tweetie, AppZapper, Bodega, DaisyDisk… These apps are genuinely good, and they will stand the test of time. Transmit, after all, has been around since OS9, on which it ran under the name of “Transit”.
All right, enough about this app, let me find something to review that I can actually criticize!

Transmit costs $34 for a single user license, and it’s $19 for upgrades.

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The hardware

The iPad looks like an obese iPhone. That’s not a bad thing – the iPhone will still be in design textbooks 200 years from now – but the overall proportions do surprise me a little. First, the display doesn’t have a widescreen ratio, which has pretty much been the standard in recent years. Instead, it features a 9.7-inch 1024×768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch 4:3 ratio display with IPS technology, which means that widescreen movies will have huge black bars on top and bottom.

Second, the bezel looks really fat compared to the dimensions of the device. Apple should have made it much thinner and added one or two inches of screen real estate. On the other hand, the bezel may be explained by the fact that you do need, after all, a place to hold the device without accidentally inputting commands on the touchscreen. Globally, the iPad’s design reminds me of a photo frame, an over inflated iPod Touch.

The insides are the real surprise. The device uses an Apple-designed chip it is calling the “A4,” (Apple finally got some use out of that PA Semi purchase, apparently) which runs at 1GHz and is used for managing everything: Processing, graphics, and I/O. The system has between 16 and 64GB of flash memory, contains Bluetooth and EDR wireless connectivity, has a speaker, and microphone, and also contains Apple’s accelerometers, ambient light sensors, and digital compass with assisted GPS technologies. There is a 30-pin connector for attaching the device to computers, but it also uses Bluetooth and Enhanced Data Rate technologies for fast wireless access up to 3Mbps. The device has a powerful battery that gives up to 10 hours of usage, and nearly a month of standby time. It’s a half-inch thick—just a hair thicker than the iPhone, for reference—and weighs 1.5 pounds. Video output runs through and iPhone-type composite adapter at up to 576p and through a dock-to-VGA adapter at up to 1024 x 768. No HDMI, no DVI—not even a Mini DisplayPort. Oh, and there isn’t a rear-facing camera, nor is there a front-facing camera. This tablet is totally camera-less, which seems a bit odd. According to Gizmodo editors, who already had the privilege of using the iPad, “it’s fasssstttt”.

The software

The operating system on the tablet is based on iPhone OS, which is in turn loosely based on OSX. In other words, it’s got the same guts as the iPhone, as well as a somewhat similar interface. What this means in practical terms is that the UI is modal; you can only display one app at a time, and there aren’t windows, per se. Apparently, the iPad currently runs on iPhone OS 3.2.

The homescreen is like a mixture between the iPhone and OSX: it uses the iPhone launcher/apps metaphor, but has an OSX-style shiny dock. It feels very spread out compared to the iPhone’s homescreen, though I suspect this is necessary to keep things from getting too overwhelming. Maybe they could have fixed this by making the icons bigger? The good news is that you can apparently customize the background.

The onscreen keyboard is very similar to the iPhone’s. Typing on it is apparently a “dream,” and “almost lifesize,” by which Steve Jobs means the size of a full hard keyboard. He wasn’t typing with his thumbs, but with his fingers, as if it were an actual laptop keyboard. Navigation throughout the rest of the OS is optimized for one hand, though. This wasn’t handled very well by Apple, they could have easily innovated with some kind of hybrid context sensitive input method, but they chose to go the safe, boring and quite unpractical way.

The browser is essentially an upscaled version of Safari Mobile, with a familiar, finger-friendly title bar and not much else. It rotates by command of the accelerometer. Apparently, it doesn’t support flash, which is an acceptable shortcoming on the iPhone, but not on a larger device like the iPad.

• Email: Mail again takes its visual cues from the iPhone, but with a lot more decoration: you can preview your mailbox from any message with a pull-down menu, and preview any message from within the mailbox, with a pop-up window.

• Music: The music player is even more hybirdized, styled like a mix between the iPhone’s iPod interface and full-fledged desktop iTunes. Interestingly, Cover Flow seems to have more or less died off. The iTunes redesign looks very fresh yet familiar, I’m quite curious to see if this will come to the desktop version of the app.

• Video: YouTube is available by way of an app, iPhone-style, which can play videos in HD. iTunes content plays back in a dedicated app, just like on the iPhone, and can also play back in HD.

• Calendar and contacts: The calendar app is desktop-like, until you open organizer mode, where it looks like a literal organizer. It’s beautiful, and dare I say a bit Courier-like. I would love to see this on the iPhone.

• Maps: This one may be the most direct conversion from the iPhone, with a very similar interface through and through. It includes Street View, too, which looks amazing on the large screen. Apparently, Apple isn’t ditching Google just yet.

• Photos: The photo library app looks a lot like iPhoto, only adapted for multitouch finger input. You can view your albums as stacks, spread them out, and sync with your desktop iPhoto to get access to faces and map functionality.

Apps

All 140,000 iPhone apps will run on the iPad. Because the screen is bigger, you’ll have to choose between running the app in the center of your screen, or in “pixel double” mode, which just blows them up crudely. Any apps you’ve purchased for your iPhone can be synced, for free, to your iPad.

The iPhone app SDK has already been expanded for tablet development, including a whole new set of UI elements and expanded resolution support. The raw iPhone app compatibility is just a temporary measure, it seems—any developer who wants their app to run on the tablet will develop for the tablet. Some of the early examples of adapted apps, like Brushes, are spectacular. More on the SDK here.

Today, Steve Jobs underlined two new apps, specifically designed for the iPad.

The first one, iBooks, is Kindle’s death. Users are basically able to buy books from an online store (same system as the App store or iTunes store),  and publishers include Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette—the big boys. The demonstration was very convincing: the app features a gorgeous UI and 3D effects to simulate real books. Only time will tell if it can compete with e-paper.

The second app is iWork, specifically designed for the iPad’s multitouch capabilities. There’s a new version of Keynote designed just for the iPad, as well as new version of Pages, Apple’s excellent word processor, and Numbers, which is the spreadsheet app. The interfaces are obviously designed strictly for touch input, but from the looks of it can handle every function that the old, mouse-centric version could, plus a few more. And man, they’re so much prettier. Each app costs $10, and you can get them all for $30.

Price and Release Date

The iPad ships worldwide in 60 days, but only in Wi-Fi versions. The 3G version will be another 30 days after that. Here are the prices:

Without 3G:

• $499: 16GB

• $599: 32GB

• $699: 64GB

With 3G:

• $629: 16GB

• $729: 32GB

• $829: 64GB

Apple will ship all the iPads in 60 days—the end of March—to America, and just the Wi-Fi models internationally. It’ll be another 30 days beyond that for 3G models to be available outside our shores; Apple says they’re still working on carrier deals.

3G comes by way of AT&T, who’s offering the service without contract, for $15 a month (250MB of data) or $30 a month (unlimited). That’s why, unlike the iPhone, the iPad is actually cheaper off-contract.

Verdict

It’s hard to reach one, given the fact that I have never used an iPad, but I must admit I’m somewhat underwhelmed by today’s keynote. The tension, suspense, and expectations that originated from the iPad have led us to think the Apple’s new device would be revolutionary, but it isn’t, or at least not right now. The lack of camera may seem awkward to some, but I understand the choice: do you see yourself holding the iPad in front of you to take a shot? Kinda weird. A front facing camera for video conferences would have been nice, but I still prefer the iPad to have none and to cost only 499$. The major shortcoming, according to me, is the lack of multitasking. What’s the point of such a huge amount of processing power and screen estate if you can’t run two apps at once? Seriously Apple, this is a big letdown. Oh and did I mention you need an adapter for USB?

When the iPhone was first released, I was very skeptical. “What? It can’t even do copy and paste?” I used to ask. But as you know, the iPhone  has changed the industry thanks to its unique app store model and a few OS updates. I expect no less from the iPad.

Is it a Kindle killer? Deffinitely yes, as long as people’s eyes don’t start exploding after using the iPad. Is it a netbook killer? Maybe. Some people may need a physical keyboard, but overall, I’d go with iPad because of its incredible UI and thousands of available apps. Oh and let’s not oversee all the nice accessories, including a physical keyboard, which may help you resolve your dilemma.

The iPad seems to be suffering from what I call the Obama syndrome: expectations were so high that it is bound to fail at one point or another. Whatever Steve Jobs may have said or showed off today, people would have been disappointed  anyway. In addition to this, Apple cornered themselves and built a device that doesn’t really excel anywhere. Jack of some trades, master of none. They could have surprised us with a traditional “one more thing” at the end of the keynote: iWork / iLife 2010, iPhone OS 4.0, i7 chips in MacBook Pros, pretty doable stuff for Apple standards. But no. Steve decided to leave it there.
The iPad isn’t a bad device; in fact it’s a great device, and I want it right here, right now; but the non-Apple fanboy part of my brain is telling me to wait till iPad 2.0 or 3.0 comes out. Add flash support, multitasking, a way of organizing apps, a camera, two or three USB ports and you’ll have a winner.

Here is the official Apple video:

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Via Gizmodo and Engadget