I have read that it is also better in terms of security. The memory is randomised when apps are loaded so it makes it tougher to break in, plus more use of sandboxes. It does mean I will look to move over sooner.

Not a bad days work:-

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/07 ... t-Day.html

Snow Leopard does that, but it of itself is of limited use if the OS components aren't also dealt with that way - which under SL they aren't. That means when you want to do anything really nasty, you'll usually know where the bit you want to get at is. Under Lion the OS memory locations are also randomised at each boot, which is a lot better. Plus there's some other stuff Lion does - which from later in the year is going to be required for Lion-friendly apps that want to be distributed via the Mac App Store - which makes it much harder to exploit programming 'holes' in Lion Apps than in previous versions. Plus it means the system will be much, much less vulnerable from attacks in things like browser plugins (you know who I'm talking about, right...).

There's some detail in Siracusa's big Lion review although.. he does as good a job of explaining it as he can but it's still fairly 'programmer-ey'.

Jon

The review that I read mentioned that and said that it was even better than Windows 7 now. This might make the annual hacking contests more interesting. As the changes will block problems like flash exploits it will end that route.

Indeed. It was getting rather tedious with the "OS X falls after 30 seconds" pattern. They were pretty much a race to see who could win the MacBook first

Seriously, it will be interesting to see what happens. It sounds like they have addressed a serious criticism that events like that highlight. Of course there is little anyone can do to prevent the gullible from clicking "yes yes yes yes yes" to attacks that rely purely on social engineering, but there really is no excuse for computers to be susceptible to "drive-by" attacks when innocently browsing infected websites.

It has cluttered up the launch bar, but I've cleared that up.

Versions: Something I've missed since I moved to Mac OS and MS-DOS in 1987. Versioning was a part of VMS back in the 70s, I'm glad Apple are finally catching up, I hope that Microsoft also catch on - which is funny, considering the guy that designed Windows NT also wrote DEC VMS.

Restoring position: Apple playing catch-up again. Close an application (that supports Lion), then re-open it, it open the docs where you left off. Something KDE on Linux has done for a long time and something that many apps have also done (Notepad++, for example). It is a great feature.

Yes, the memory randomisation was something that Apple implemented in Snow Leopard, but which was broken / only half implemented and never really worked. How it works against memory overflow attacks is something we will have to wait and see. It will be harder, but not impossible to circumvent.

My iMac no longer sleeps! It blanks the screen, but the white light stays on constantly, it doesn't start pulsing when it is sleeping.

Generally yes, but I'm finding it a bit of a pain on occasion. The problem is now you can't quit an application 'cleanly'. An example : I use QT player to play films that have been ripped to my media box. Before, after I finished watching the film, I quit QTP. The next time I wanted to watch a film, I double clicked the film's file, QTP started, I'm away. Now, I double click the film, QTP starts, loads the film I was watching last time and the film I want to watch now and starts playing both of them. I have to actually make sure all the files it was playing are closed before quitting QTP, which given the new 'full screen = separate space' model is quite laborious. That's... less useful. Ideally , what you need is a separate option (maybe a keyboard shortcut) to say 'quit the app and don't save state'. It's a nice feature, but it needs to be more granular than 'all or nothing', which is what it is at the moment.


The light on my mac mini pulses when it's asleep. IIRC isn't it an option in the energy saver panel to do it or not? Worth a check to see if the re-install has reverted the setting.

Jon

There is an option (somewhere) to turn off the resume feature for each app.

I read an article about someone complaining about the same thing.

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/20/how ... e-feature/

Sadly, no. That tickbox disables it for all apps, not for any given one. As it stands there doesn't seem to be a way to say 'I want this app to restore state, but I want this one to restart with a 'vanilla' setup' or even 'I want my apps to restore but just next time I want you to restart in a vanilla state'. I can see this being a problem if you get an app restarting with a corrupted config/loaded file which causes it to crash. The techyliterati would probably be able to sort this (my guess is : delete the app's prefs file) but I''m not sure everyone else would.


As an aside The Register points out that there are now 50 times as many 'OSX lions' in the wild as.. actual lions. Somehow, I can't bring myself to consider this positively.

Jon

Another potential issue (although not for me )...

You happen to be browsing some questionable content *cough* porn *cough* when your father, mother, sister, housemate, girlfriend, boyfirned, etc... walks in.

You quickly close Safari and relax as you realise you managed to get away with it! *phew*

And then you are asked to look up something on the web or they want to show you a video/website etc... Now when you open Safari it will open in the state it was when it closed... not good.

You could open it blank and then use the Reopen All Windows from Last Session to restore your porn.

Spoken from a purely theoretical viewpoint, I'm sure

An obvious question that springs from this is - what about 'private browsing'? As far as I'm aware, once you switch that on, Safari saves no 'state data' at all - no history, no cookies, no cached data. If it does a 'restore' when you quit with 'private browsing' switched on, that's a major bug. And a serious problem for anywhere that uses Macs in public access areas, like colleges and libraries.

BTW, the obvious solution is to have both Safari and something else (chrome/omniweb etc) installed, then you can start the 'safe' browser should you need to access anything while they're looking over your shoulder. Well, that seems like what I'd do, if I were ever faced with such a situation...

Jon

I have not used private browsing so cannot comment on whether you can save states etc. I am the only one who uses my machines so it is an irrelevant option for me. I did find that having Safari with anything "porn like" in a separate space so the main space looked normal was best for me.