Selected Apple developers will already have their hands on a special preview release of OSX Lion – the eighth major release of the excellent Apple Unix operating system.

Philip Schiller, with Apple Marketing said “The iPad has inspired a new generation of innovative features in Lion, Developers are going to love Mission Control and Launchpad, and can now start adding great new Lion features like full screen, gestures, Versions and Auto Save to their own apps.”

The new operating system has a key focus on Apple's mobile business with many new features aimed at the recent Apple notebooks with multi touch gesture and swiping support. New Mission Control will unify Spaces, Dashboard and Expose and full screen applications to give a clever overview of all the applications and windows opened on the machine. With new swipe support the desktop can be zoomed out to highlight windows which are grouped. Navigation has been enhanced to allow fast movement with single clicks. New Launchpad copies the iPad interface for specific uses, meaning that application folders can be set up for quick navigation.

No official release date has yet been named, but there may be a possibility that something will be announced next Tuesday at the iPad 2 launch event.

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