First up on the WWDC plate was the debut of Mac OS X Lion. It really does seem like this version of Apple’s OS is indeed the melding of its iOS and Mac OS platforms. Gestures will play a big part here in navigation, and Apple has made the decision to move to the full screen app model.

Both we are used to in the mobile (iOS) world, so it only makes sense. So does the new Mission Control feature, which pops up apps much like iOS. In our liveblog, Doug Aamoth of Techland made an interesting comment: “Sounds like Apple *might* be planning a slow, methodical phase-out of the common mouse.” I can’t say I disagree with that.

Advancing on the Mac App Store first introduced with Mac OS 10.6.7, the company plans to make it even more a part of Lion. In-app purchases would now be available, and a built-in sandboxing would allow developers to push changes to an app rather than having them redownload the entire application.

In fact, Lion is going to be available through the App Store. No hard copies of the OS would be available. My question: how is Apple gonna handle that crush!

Autosave would allow any app to save work as a user enters it, and versions would work much the same, only saving changes and allowing a person to step back and forward through changes made to a document.

A feature called Airdrop would enable the sharing of files and folders via Wi-Fi with no setup required. That’s pretty neat: sometimes setting up shared folders is a pain. I do wonder though how they dealt with security concerns?

Mail has also got a facelift, appearing more like its iPad counterpart, reports Harry. Search has been beefed up, adding a suggestion function for search queries to help refine searches, as well as autocompletion. Both should help in searching through our sometimes cluttered inboxes.

Lion will be available in July for $29.

 
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