Apple officially introduces OS X Lion at WWDC – $29, releasing in July

We’ve been waiting for ages to hear the details and now we finally have them. Apple’s Phil Schiller and Craig Ferericchi have taken the stage to fill us in. First off, and probably most importantly, it’s $29 and you can use it on any of your Macs and you can buy it in the Mac App Store for upgrades.

Touting the fact that Macs as a whole have outpaced the PC industry in the past year with 54 million total Mac users worldwide, Schiller states that the industry wants to copy Apple. In the 10 years since OS X launched, much has changed.

Lion will have over 250 new features, with 10 being discussed today:

Multitouch Gestures: All of the same gestures that you’ve grown to love in your iOS devices will now be featured in OS X.

Full-Screen Apps: No more borders, no more windows. There will be built-in tools of Lion to make apps run full screen, taking the work of the developers. You’ll have multiple desktops and all apps accessed through the Mission Control function. The bookmarks bar swipes in and out from the top of Safari in fullscreen, as well. Accessing Mission Control wil be a three-finger swipe, bringing all of your windows to an easily-selectable format.

Mac App Store: Taking a shot at the big box retailers, Schiller states that people have found an easier way to buy apps via the App Store. “The Mac App Store has become the number 1 source for buying PC software,” claims Schiller. For Lion-specific apps, Apple is pushing even further with built-in sandboxing and delta updates so that you don’t have to download an entire app again. System-wide resume will take you back to an app as you left it, instead of having to restart. All apps will be installed to the Launchpad, as well, keeping them firmly in one place.

Auto-saving will kill the need to tell someone “you should’ve saved”. Versioning of the autosave feature will be automatic. You can even browse versions of an app in an interface that’s similar to Time Machine. Quitting an application will save its status, removing the need to be prompted to save before exiting. Older versions require nothing more than just clicking on the name of a doc in the “All Versions” view. With versioning, you’ll be able to copy from one version and then paste it into another.

AirDrop

Apple’s AirDrop wil allow you to easily share files between computers over a peer-to-peer WiFi network. The AirDrop control panel will show you all of the people around you using AirDrop. You can simply drag and drop onto other people’s Lion machines running AirDrop

Mail

The new version of Mail in Lion will have a full message window (quite like what we have in Sparrow, actually). There is a section for snippets, as well as a favorites bar. New search suggestions will update in real time and provide suggestions about what other things or people you might be wanting to find. The conversation view will work independent of your contacts’ client.

Once you’re finished with a conversation, just drag it into a folder and you’re done.