OSX Lion is the latest incarnation of Apple’s flagship operating system and last week the official GM seed was sent to developers for testing. Yesterday I put it through it’s paces and have been happily surprised with the performance and improvements laid out in the latest release, attached is a quick video of Lion in action in all it’s one solid O/S.

To note,

• Launchpad for Apps (iOS)
• Mission Control
• FaceTime now integrated
• Address Book UI upgraded (more like iOS Books)
• Reset User Password via Apple ID
• Touchpad Gestures now a core part of the O/S
• Masses of UI improvements, gone and the rounded corners.
• Can set specific desktop background per Virtual Desktop / Space
• Fancy drag animation when moving files (gets out of the way of the cursor)
• Loads more…

On the App side everything still works pretty well, the following apps operate fine on Lion:

• Photoshop CS5
• Transmit
• Coda
• CornerStone SVN
• CSS Edit
• OmniGraffle
• VLC
• Tower
• TextMate
• MAMP & MAMP Pro

These Apps have visual problems that need fixing for Lion:

• Versions (opens main window & other regardless, sidebar cut-off)
• Espresso (desktop background seeps into interface)

Regarding official release date for OSX Lion my gut feeling says mid-July, in all the builds done and dusted just up to Apple to sign-off on things so you may be lucky and find it in the App Store this Tuesday.

Nice work Apple.

Today was time well spent building & booting the latest Chromium operating system.

Chromium OS is an open-source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web.

I’ve uploaded an image of the successful build, it’s taken from an 8gb stick and is available here (downloadable size 530mb).

Build Info:

Chromium OS 0.11.231.2011._03_06_1150
Chromium 11.0.691.0

You should be able to use an image writer or DD to copy the image onto a suitable stick and then boot from it.

Developers Guide here