Apple today released a developer preview of its upcoming major release of Mac OS X. Dubbed “Lion” in a long list of cat-themed names, this new 10.7 version includes a ton of features that bring it up-to-par with the latest innovations in its iOS platform which powers iPhone & iPad.

Jared’s Take: Pouring over some of the finer details on Apple’s developer site and comments from developers on discussion boards, this is a definite shift in direction for the Mac platform. The always-on, always-available, “fluid” nature of the iPhone & iPad which we’ve grown to love and appreciate–that kind of “appliance” style reliability–is now being applied to the sometimes squirrely realm of traditional desktop computing. Features like autosave, multi-touch switching of fullscreen apps, LaunchPad, instant recall of app state, background process management, the tighter integration with Apple’s App Store–all this combines to create a new and compelling experience by which future computer systems from Microsoft and others will be judged.

The power-control geek crowd may find some pause for concern here, as Apple continues the shift away from “bare metal” access to files, power utilities, and manual management of running processes towards a consumer-centric appliance model where everything under the hood is hidden away. Even I am wary of the implications, I’ll admit. Still, it’s clear there will always be some environment where the bare metal is accessible–simply because that’s the only way you could develop the “sandboxed” apps that will live on these new iOS-style platforms. In other words, developers need developer tools, plain and simple.

I’m excited about Lion. I think this will be the most innovative Mac OS X release since 10.4 Tiger from an end-user perspective. We shall see come summer.

From the press release:

Lion features Mission Control, an innovative new view of everything running on your Mac; Launchpad, a new home for all your Mac apps; full screen apps that use the entire Mac display; and new Multi-Touch™ gestures. Lion also includes the Mac App Store℠, the best place to discover, install and automatically update Mac apps. The Lion preview is available to Mac Developer Program members through the Mac App Store today, and the final version of Lion will ship to customers this summer.

“The iPad has inspired a new generation of innovative features in Lion,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Developers are going to love Mission Control and Launchpad, and can now start adding great new Lion features like full screen, gestures, Versions and Auto Save to their own apps.”

Mission Control is a powerful, entirely new feature that unifies Exposé®, Dashboard, Spaces®, and full screen apps to give you a bird’s eye view of every app and window running on your Mac. With a simple swipe, your desktop zooms out to display your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full screen apps as well as your Dashboard, and allows you to instantly navigate anywhere with a click.

Launchpad makes it easier than ever to find and launch any app. With a single click, Launchpad displays all your Mac apps in a stunning full screen layout where you can launch, re-order or organize apps into folders. You can also arrange apps into multiple pages and swipe between them.

Lion brings the full screen experience that iPad users love to the Mac. With one click, your application window goes full screen, taking advantage of your Mac’s brilliant display. You can swipe from one full screen window to another and even back to your Desktop or Dashboard.

New Multi-Touch gestures and fluid animations give you a natural and intuitive way to interact with your Mac. New gestures include pinching your fingers to zoom in on a web page or image, swiping left or right to turn a page or switch between full screen apps and swiping up to enter Mission Control.

Lion also includes the Mac App Store, where you can find great new apps, buy them with your iTunes® account, and download and install them in just one step. Apps purchased from the Mac App Store are installed directly into Launchpad.

Additional features in Lion include:

• a new version of Mail, with an elegant, widescreen layout inspired by the iPad; Conversations, which automatically groups related messages into one easy to read timeline; more powerful search; and support for Microsoft Exchange 2010;
• AirDrop, a remarkably simple way to copy files wirelessly from one Mac to another with no setup;
• Versions, which automatically saves successive versions of your document as you create it, and gives you an easy way to browse, edit and even revert to previous versions;
• Resume, which conveniently brings your apps back exactly how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;
• Auto Save, which automatically saves your documents as you work;
• the all new FileVault, that provides high performance full disk encryption for local and external drives, and the ability to wipe data from your Mac instantaneously; and
• Mac OS X Lion Server, which makes setting up a server easier than ever and adds support for managing Mac OS X Lion, iPhone®, iPad and iPod touch® devices.

Two things that are really cool: Agendas and MiFi.

Agendas lets you set up a meeting agenda on your iPad, and then “broadcast” the agenda to all other iPads on the local network. And by agenda, I don’t mean just some text on a white sheet, I mean a full interactive graphical experience complete with two-way question/answer/discussion going on. That, in my opinion, is totally cool. I have not yet used it on my iPad as I don’t have a second one handy to test it with, but it’s been recommended to me and you need to check out their video to see what it can do.

MiFi is Verizon’s very nifty little black thingamajigdodad that creates a wireless hotspot for your iPad, notebook, etc. out of their 3G network. I was part of a presentation yesterday unveiling a website I’d worked on for a client, and he had an iPad and a MiFi set up and it was very cool. No WiFi available? No problem. In the past, that would have killed our presentation, but instead we were able to pull it off using the MiFi. So check it out. I think I’ll get me one very soon (my iPad is WiFi-only).

Apple? Social network? Yeah I know, it’s a bit of a culture-shock. Apple doesn’t quite seem like the “warm fuzzy community builder” company. But, indeed, Apple just released iTunes 10 and with it comes a whole new social network called Ping.

What is Ping all about? Like the title of this post says, and like Steve Jobs repeatedly emphasized in his keynote address, it is a social network all about music. Music. I don’t think this can be stressed highly enough. Most people who are critical of Ping right now don’t understand this. In Twitter, the unit of importance is a 140 character message called a Tweet. It often comes with a link attached. Tweets can be about anything in the world. In Facebook, the unit of importance is a shared object from a friend (which can be a status update, link, photo, etc.). Again, it can be about anything.

In Ping, the unit of importance is music. That’s it. It can be a song or an album or an artist, but it’s all about music. I didn’t understand this yesterday. I was mad I couldn’t dress up my profile with more info about me, or post status updates for people to read. I didn’t understand quite what the point was of being on Ping, since most of my favorite artists don’t have profiles up yet. But then today, I hopped over to the iTunes Store to see if I could find an artist’s Ping profile from an artist’s page. It turns out the answer is an obvious yes, but before I solved that, I discovered something really amazing. I can “Like” or “Post” anything on the iTunes Store. Bingo. That’s the killer app right there. So I can find stuff I like, whether I even own it or not, and then post it to my profile to share with anyone who’s following me. That gives Ping an extra dimension.

Now you may be thinking there are other social networks that work like that, networks that allow people to post music they like. Sure there are. Are they built into iTunes? No. Realize this: Ping isn’t something Apple just hacked together and stuck up on a Web site to try out. Ping is iTunes. iTunes is Ping. I really don’t think that can be stressed enough. The #1 way to find, purchase, and enjoy music on iTunes now will be through Ping, and everyone who likes to shop on iTunes will be using Ping to share the music they like. It’s that simple.

No, Facebook isn’t going anywhere. Twitter isn’t going anywhere. Heck, I don’t think Last.fm or Soundcloud are going anywhere. It’s just that Ping is going to be very successful for exactly what it is: a social network for music built right into iTunes.

And I think that’s pretty cool.

I’m really excited to announce that I’ve started up a new blog called iPad Artistry, and I will be posting photos and a series of detailed reviews of the iPad beginning tomorrow when I pick mine up from the Apple Store.

While this is a design & technology blog, I realized that, as Siteshine is a Web design company, it would be wise to focus mainly on issues related to Web design and creativity. I will cross-link to iPad Artistry from time to time when it seems appropriate, and I do believe the iPad truly will be a driving force in the future of the Web. But if you’re not as much of a fanboy as I am, you can just stay here on NetNotes.

Check out my latest opinion piece on iPad Artistry and let me know your thoughts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how touch screens and multitouch gestures will impact Web design, particularly with tablet devices ala the iPad coming out (see my previous article here & also here). It didn’t occur to me until today that the iPhone’s Safari browser has a multitouch API, which means that the iPad will also come with multitouch support in the browser. What does this mean?

It means that Web sites that cater to iPad users will be able to craft amazing new experiences that simply aren’t possible on desktops and notebooks. One such example (only viewable on iPhone at present) is a virtual light table for interacting with photos. This is only a demo, but can you imagine Facebook, Picasa, or some other online site providing an in-browser light table for arranging and grouping photos right in the browser using Javascript, CSS3, and multitouch? That’s just one use case. There are many others.

Now I realize that native iPhone/iPad apps are able to do incredible things, but ultimately, I’m looking ahead to how Web sites will be transformed by multitouch. It’s coming. And, as a Web designer, I want to make sure I’m ready for the transition.

Tim Cook, the COO of Apple and one of Steve Jobs’ right hand men, recently spoke at a Goldman Sachs technology conference. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the webcast yet, but over at The Business Insider, How Apple Keeps Its Laser-Sharp Focus quotes Cook and shines the light on how Apple maintains its innovative edge and continues to make more money doing less stuff. Excellent read.

My take: Steve or Tim should write a book titled “The Power of No”.

Seriously, it’s really important to be able to define and articulate what you’re not. What’s Microsoft not? At this point, what’s Google not? There’s really not a clear idea of what they stand for or are trying to accomplish other than be huge and dominate everything.

Apple’s not a generic computer manufacturer. Apple’s not a company that focuses on technology for technology’s sake. Apple doesn’t release low-end stuff that cuts corners to save costs. Apple doesn’t suck up to some business process fad or IT dictatorship and cripple their ability to innovate.

It’s important to know what you’re not so you can focus on what you are. Kudos to the Apple management team for understanding that important principle.

As promised, here is my take on the new Apple iPad, announced today at a special event and slated (ha) to be released in late March. I will answer the title question, but first, the details.

First of all, the hardware specs are impressive. The display is a 1024×768 resolution with a 9.7 inch size LED-backlit screen. It’s 0.5 inches thick and weighs 1.5 pounds. Multi-touch is a given, and the big surprise here is that Apple is using a custom-designed 1GHz processor named the A4. Hands-on reports from the event indicate the the speed of the interface is extremely fast and responsive. The physical design is very attractive but nothing really new for any current user of an iPhone or even MacBook. We in the tech sector knew exactly what we wanted an Apple tablet to look like, and Apple delivered. One thing I was wondering about was external video support, and it looks like a VGA display out is supported via a Dock connector adapter. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works for on-the-fly presentations.

The software interface for the iPad is gorgeous. It’s a natural evolution of the iPhone OS and the enhanced capabilities of key apps like Calendar, Contacts, E-mail, and iPod/iTunes compared to the iPhone are obvious and most welcome. I was most impressed by the look & feel of the Calendar app — interacting with your appointments has never been this fun! — and Mail which has borrowed a page from Microsoft and shows a sleek vertically-oriented 2-pane interface when the iPad is in landscape mode. In fact, many apps sport a multi-pane design which make sense considering you could pretty much fit three iPhones side-by-side on one iPad. The animations and transitions through the software as you use your fingers on the touchscreen may seem like superfluous eye-candy, but it really does make the interface feel more “real” and organic.

Pricing is not mind-blowing but very reasonable: $499 for the base model with 16GB of memory, $599 and $699 for 32GB and 64GB respectively. You’ll have to pay an additional $130 if you get a model with 3G connectivity (highly useful if you want to hop on AT&T’s cell network when you aren’t around a WiFi hotspot).

Now the reason for the title of the post is this: already the naysayers and tech prognosticators are coming out with guns blazing to say the iPad is doomed because it doesn’t support multi-tasking (it runs one app at a time just like the iPhone), doesn’t have a USB port, doesn’t have an iSight camera, can’t run full-featured desktop OS apps, and isn’t suitable as an e-book reader because it uses an LCD backlit display instead of e-ink. Now I would love multi-tasking support so I could work on something while Pandora radio is playing in the background. But, guess what? I have an iPhone to play Pandora on. I would love to have an iSight camera to do video conferencing on. But guess what? I have a MacBook Pro for that, and I can run all the big OS apps on that I want.

The iPad isn’t a replacement for a computer. The iPad isn’t a keyboard-less MacBook. The iPad is a highly-portable, inexpensive, fun-to-use consumer device for surfing the Web, enjoying visually-inspiring multimedia content, managing the day-to-day aspects of one’s life, and doing fun stuff like reading, research, and Internet communication on a screen far easier to work with than the tiny screen on an iPhone/iPod touch. The iPad is for people that don’t need a whole lot of features. That’s why all of the tablet PCs have failed in the consumer marketplace to date and new Windows 7-based tablets like the HP Slate will be another niche product. Nobody wants a PC with a tiny touchscreen. The OS sucks for that, the software is far too complicated, and the multimedia experience is subpar.

There’s a reason the iPod won and beat out all other MP3 players. It does exactly what it needs to do to play content, and no more. The iPhone is a smash hit because it does exactly what it needs to do to be a mobile phone, a tool for managing your daily business & personal life, and a way to play casual games and have fun online.

The iPad will be a successful product because it does only what it needs to do, and no more. In fact, the iPad is more significant for what it can’t do than what it can. I’m a Web designer, so I use Photoshop all the time. But the iPad will never run Photoshop. If Adobe does comes out with a Photoshop for the iPad, it will be radically different, and it should. The mantra of the iPhone/iPod/iPad is simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. Make computing easy and fun. Remove all the headaches. Stay focused on core features only and wrap them in the most attractive interface ever. People will pay for that, and they have. They bought the iPod. They bought the iPhone. And they’ll buy the iPad.

At least I will.

I was an iPhone user pretty much from Day 1. That was back in summer of 2007. It was the first portable touchscreen computer I’d ever used, and it rocked. But let me give you even more backstory…

In the 2000-2001, a company named Be announced they would be partnering with several companies to launch “Internet Appliances” or IAs that would come in several form factors. Be had been developing a desktop OS named BeOS for several years prior but was unable to find traction in a consumer PC market dominated by Microsoft. They decided to retool BeOS into BeIA and give it a go in the device space.

One of the main uses of BeIA that was demonstrated was in a wireless handheld device sporting the tablet form factor (see the photo at right) The hope was that a specialized Internet-enabled OS with an interface and development stack suited to next-generation graphics and touchscreen hardware would capture the market by storm. As we all know now, BeIA never took off commercially and Be ended up getting bought by Palm, who more or less let BeOS and BeIA lanquish into complete obscurity.

Here’s the thing though: I wanted a BeIA Web tablet. I wanted it bad. I dreamed of being able to roam around the house with a book-sized slate in my hand, writing e-mail and surfing the Web wirelessly and enjoying sophisticated multimedia content. Remember, this was years before the iPhone, before the iPod even, before Mac OS X was first released. When I saw BeIA tablets, I saw the future.

Now here we are, and it’s 2010, and Apple is very likely to announce tomorrow the first Mac OS X tablet computer. Granted, the rumors seem to indicate it will probably be running a variant of the iPhone OS, but that’s basically a variant of Mac OS X, so I like to call it the OS X Tablet. Why is this significant? It’s significant because Apple is going to parlay its incredible success with the Mac, iPod, and iPhone platforms into a new platform. It’s significant because Apple will be making the undeniable statement that tablets are the future. They were the future in 2000 and they are the future in 2010. The reason they never took off in the past whether it was Be or Microsoft or another company pushing the form factor is because the price, the software functionality, and the hardware design never hit that magic sweet spot.

I believe Apple will hit that sweet spot, and if this device takes off like I had hoped the BeIA devices would ten years ago, it could revolutionize how we consume content and interact with media on the Web. It could cement the sea change already underway with the iPhone and tip the scales of the Web from a mouse-and-keyboard centric interface to a touch-based interface. It could change what we think of when we think of a “Web site” and usher a new milestone in the evolution of online interactivity.

Hyperbole? Maybe. But remember: I’ve been wanting a slick Web tablet for ten years. To say I’m excited about what might be announced tomorrow is a grave understatement.

Come back tomorrow, and I’ll share my thoughts on whatever Apple has pulled out of its hat once again!