iOS 5 reached Golden Master status on October 4th. Lion’s launch today falls right along the launch of iOS 5 which has also been in incubation for a long, long time. You can read more about these features in our post on OS X Lion’s features. This is besides all-new features like Mission Control, Versions, Air Drop and a powerful new Mail application. Features like a dedicated App Store (also available on Snow Leopard), full-screen apps, multi-touch gestures, Launchpad are all essentially ported over to the desktop from iOS devices. It packs over 250 new features and its main catch is how it brings over some of the best features of iOS to OS X. OS X Lion was released on July 20th earlier this year. Simply enter an existing Apple ID or create a new one and then follow the on screen instructions.

After installing the update, OS X will automatically present an iCloud setup panel. So, enticed by smooth gestures, full-screen apps and an iOS-like Launchpad, you’ve made the move to Apple’s latest big cat, Lion.Getting started with iCloud is easy. The company’s made no secret of the fact that with this release, they’re ditching support for applications in Power PC format. Is it possible to claw back control over these apps on your new operating system? Yet this is a hard hit to take if you use Logic, Photoshop, Dreamweaver or any number of industry-standard applications in their current iterations. Mac apps come in three different flavours: PowerPC, Universal and Intel.

As you’d expect, the latter is fine, as all Macs these days run with Intel processors. Universal is similarly problem-free, as it includes both Intel and PowerPC support – the only problem being that this dual support increases the file size of these apps and eats up disk space. PowerPC, though, is where the difficulties are found. The format needs to be translated before Macs can run these applications, and the translation is done using a process called Rosetta.

With Lion, Apple is getting rid of Rosetta, and so making it impossible for Macs to read the untranslated PowerPC code. The theory behind this is that because the translation process makes these apps run slower, it’s best to get rid of them altogether and stick to Intel format. However, there are ways of reintroducing Rosetta and breathing new life into your PowerPC apps. Run your Mac with dual bootĪlthough Lion doesn’t include Rosetta support, Snow Leopard runs it without a grumble.

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