Thoughts/Advice: Mac OS X Lion Part II

I'll get straight to the point. I'm going to cover the versions of the stock OS X software. This is beside the point of whether you use these apps or not.  They are actually more useful this time around, so I encourage users to try them out.

Safari
Religiously praised by the Mob but notoriously hated by the die-hard Windows community, Safari is a mix bag by all measure. The truth is that Safari just works on the Mac. The translation to Windows is (and continues to be IMO) not optimized. Regardless, Safari is back once again, and it has a several new features. Safari also runs much better than it's predecessor. Keep in mind, as I tell about these features, if there are any that are from the last version, I apologize. I am a Google Chrome user, and I'm only now starting to embrace this browser...at least in the Mac side of computing.

Safari 5.1...looks no different, right?

..but no! There are a couple new tricks. First being the Reading List. Basically, it's a fancy RSS feed for articles that you either want to save for reading later, or if you really liked said article. I could have used this last semester when I was doing my psych paper..

By holding shift while clicking an article, Safari will save the article to the list for later enjoyment (or gawk at...yes, I know what "gawk" is..I'll show you in a bit.).

Another..

Dumb? Of course you're not! There are times when you stumble on a word that makes no sense, right? Never fear! New Oxford is here to save your post from being forever trolled. Right clicking and selecting "Look up.." will now bring up the definition. I believe that this feature was shown previously, but it usually launched the Dictionary app. Obviously this new feature is the easier compromise.

The dreaded autocorrecting feature that screws up mobile texts now exist in Safari Land (as well as all Apple based apps). you can either choose a word, or you can let autocorrect do it for you. The previous red underlined option is also available.

Downloads are now shown on the upper right corner. You can also drag and drop those downloads from the list to whatever folder you wish.

A nicer feature makes use of the gestures. Instead of being mediocre, be a hipster and two finger swipe to the left and go back to the previous page. 

Other Technical features:

-Auto resume from your last page (a now standard function of all Apple made apps)

-Tap and pinch zooming

-Private Autofill

-Auto setup for email providers.

-built-in sandboxing (to prevent malicious tracking)

-GPU support via html5

-Web Open Font Format (which allows designers to use a lot more fonts for their sites

-CSS3 auto-hyphenation, vertical text (for Japanese, Chinese and Korean), & Emphasis (again, for eastern asian text).

-website data view & purge

-MathML (which shows math notations)

-dual processing (one for web-content and the other for the interface. in case the browser interface becomes unresponsive, web page will continue to load)

-Media cache (temp stores audio/video using html5 for offline playback. This mainly benefits slower connections.)

*Tech specs provided at: http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#safari

Mail

Mail for Lion took a cue from the Mail app for the iPad and added a number of features.

The overall layout that you will be seeing looks just like the mail app on the iPad.