Apple releases dev preview of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion with AirDrop, FileVault

Apple on Thursday released a developer preview of Mac OS X Lion, which takes some of the best ideas the company has conceived for the iPad and brings them back to the Mac for the eighth major release of the flagship operating system due this summer. The beta also reveals a handful of previously undisclosed features such as AirDrop and FileVault. Among Lion's core features are:

Mission Control: a powerful, entirely new feature that unifies Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, and full screen apps to give you a bird’s eye view of every app and window running on your Mac. With a simple swipe, your desktop zooms out to display your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full screen apps as well as your Dashboard, and allows you to instantly navigate anywhere with a click.

Launchpad: makes it easier than ever to find and launch any app. With a single click, Launchpad displays all your Mac apps in a stunning full screen layout where you can launch, re-order or organize apps into folders. You can also arrange apps into multiple pages and swipe between them.

Full screen apps: Lion brings the full screen experience that iPad users love to the Mac. With one click, your application window goes full screen, taking advantage of your Mac’s brilliant display. You can swipe from one full screen window to another and even back to your Desktop or Dashboard.

New Multi-Touch gestures: New Multi-Touch gestures and fluid animations give you a natural and intuitive way to interact with your Mac. New gestures include pinching your fingers to zoom in on a web page or image, swiping left or right to turn a page or switch between full screen apps and swiping up to enter Mission Control.

The Mac App Store: Apple's new online store that allows you discover, install and automatically update Mac apps.