There was much speculation that not only would Mac OS X Lion's release date be today (Thursday, July 14), but so would the release of new MacBook Airs and new Mac Pros, as well, but it seems not be the the case.

There was much speculation that not only would Mac OS X Lion's release date be today (Thursday, July 14), but so would the release of new MacBook Airs and new Mac Pros, as well, but it seems not be the the case.

Mac OS X Lion's release date thus remains a mystery, as do the rest of the release dates. This version of OS X is versioned 10.7, and was covered in detail at this year's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), along with iOS 5.

It's been quite a while since the last OS X refresh. That was Snow Leopard, all the way back in August of 2009. Although the July 14th rumored date for a release has come and gone, there seems to be a sort of deadline ahead: Apple will release its earnings on July 19th. Most are speculating that a Mac OS X Lion release date would most likely be prior to that date, as well as the MacBook Air and Mac Pro refreshes.

Mac OS X Lion achieved Gold Master status on July 1, 2011, so it should be appearing anytime soon. The new version will bring many features already included in Apple's iOS to the Mac. For example, it will include an easily-navigable display of installed applications. The first developer's preview of Lion was released on February 24, 2011 (11A390) to subscribers of Apple's developers program. Other developer previews have been released since then. Lion Preview 4 (11A480b) being released at WWDC 2011.

Lion was first introduced at the "Back to the Mac" keynote in October 2010, when some of the new features were announced. In February os 2011, Apple updated its website with still more details, and other features were announced at the WWDC 2011 keynote or on Apple's Mac OS X Lion Web site after the keynote. Apple website says there are over 250 new or changed features in Lion, including:

• Address Book now has an iPad-like user interface
• AirDrop – Lion-to-Lion direct file sharing via Wi-Fi Direct, with no wireless access point required.
• Address space layout randomization – Address space layout randomization (ASLR), a security technique that puts important data in unpredictable locations, making it harder to target known weaknesses, is available for 32-bit applications, and "has been improved for all applications", in Lion.
• Auto-correction behaves similar to iOS devices, with an iOS-like popup box.
• Auto Save – As in iOS, documents in applications written to use Auto Save will be saved automatically so users don't have to worry about manually managing their documents.
• Emoji support – Apple has added a new Emoji font commonly used in chat to express ideograms.
• Exposé in the Dock, a way of activating Exposé for a single application from the Dock, a feature added in Mac OS X 10.6, is altered. One must now double-tap with two fingers on a dock icon to initiate single application exposé, or simply right-click or control-click and select Show All Windows.
• FaceTime now comes bundled Mac OS X.
• FileVault now offers full disk encryption added security with XTS-AES 128 data encryption. Support for FileVault on external hard drives has also been added.
• Finder improvements – Finder search offers suggestions, files can be grouped by various attributes, and one can now merge files under two folders with the same name – a prompt will appear asking whether one wants to replace or keep both files.
• Font Book 3—Font Book 3 now provides more flexible displays of character glyphs supplied by a particular font face. Duplicate font files are now flagged with a warning icon, and can be fixed automatically or resolved manually.
• Full-screen apps – Native, system-wide support for full-screen applications. Supporting applications display a new button at the top right of application window, this button opens applications in full-screen mode.
• High-quality multilingual speech voices – users can download new high-quality voices in more than forty languages and dialects.
• iCal has an updated user interface, an annual view, and support for a full-screen view.
• iChat now has support for logging into Yahoo! Messenger. Users can audio- and video-chat with other iChat users using their Yahoo! accounts.
• Languages/Localisation – Arabic, Czech, Turkish and Hungarian are added as full system languages, to make the total number of twenty-two languages available in Mac OS X.
• Launchpad – An application launcher that displays an iOS-like icon grid of installed applications. It features the ability to make multiple pages and group apps into folders that function the same as folders in iOS.
• Mac App Store – An application store built in the image of the iOS App Store. Like in iOS, it will provide ways for shoppers to discover apps, one-click installation of apps, and one-click updates of all or selected installed applications. Despite being announced as a future feature of Lion, the Mac App Store was released for Mac OS X Snow Leopard on January 6, 2011 as it was bundled with the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update.
• Mail 5 – Uses an iPad-like user interface, has a fullscreen-optimized view, uses chronological "Conversations" to organize messages, and supports Exchange 2010.
• Mission Control replaces the "All windows" Exposé feature. It gives an overview of all running applications just like "All windows" but groups windows from the same application. At the top of the screen it gives quick access to the Dashboard, Spaces, and running full screen applications.
• Multi-touch gestures – Similar to iOS, additional gestures performed using a multi-touch input device (e.g. Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad) will allow the user to scroll, swipe to different pages, and enter Mission Control. While this is not the first official multi-touch support for Mac OS X, it has been expanded; other frameworks, such as Lux, have already created multi-touch support.
• Multi-User Screen Sharing—The built-in Screen Sharing feature now allows remote users to log into a separate user account from the one that is currently logged in. That means that while one user is logged into a machine, a second user can login to the same machine remotely, seeing their own desktop and user environment.
• Preview gains several features, including full-screen support and the ability to sign a document just by holding a signed piece of paper up to the camera.
• QuickTime re-incorporates some features from QuickTime Pro. New features cited include Copy/Paste, Insert Clip, Crop Video, Rotate Video, Resize, Trim, and more Export options.
• Recovery Partition – Apple has introduced a recovery partition that includes utilities generally found on the OS X discs. This partition will allow the user to restore their computer to its original factory state.
• Resume – Applications resume in the same state when re-opened.
• Safari has a full-screen mode and includes the WebKit2 layout engine.
• System Information – This feature is a re-design of "About This Mac" and has been completely altered with new views which display graphical information on displays, storage devices, memory usage along with other hardware information.
• Terminal has extra features, including full screen mode.
• TextEdit gains a new graphical toolbar with font selection and text highlighting. The new TextEdit also supports Apple's new automatic file saving and versions technologies.
• Versions – Time Machine-like saving and browsing of past versions of documents for applications written to use Versions.
• Vertical text – Mac OS X Lion supports vertical layouts for East Asian languages.