WWDC, Apple's big developer conference, is wrapping up today. We sent a team of our developers to this years conference, as we have done for the last few years...
What's the deal with Lion?
We've been doing extensive testing with 10.7 since the first developer previews were announced earlier this year and were able to chat to Apple developers at WWDC about certain details we're still looking into. We'll need to release some minor updates for a few apps, but on the whole, we're pleased to report that most equinux consumer apps are already in pretty good shape for Lion.
Scroll bars
As demonstrated in the WWDC keynote, Apple has changed the default look of scroll bars in Lion – they now look like the familiar iOS scroll bars. We currently use custom scrollbars in nearly all of our apps (swapping the default candy-blue aqua scroll bars for a slightly darker look), so we'll be updating a few apps (notably iSale) to support the new default iOS-style scroll bars.
Here's what the scroll bars look like today in Snow Leopard and Lion. As you can see, the scroll bars don't show up at all in Lion, not even if you scroll with your track pad or mouse (by default they are invisible unless you're scrolling). That'll be fixed with one of the next free iSale updates.
WebKit
Lion also comes with a new version of Webkit, the browsing engine that powers Safari and web views in third-party apps. We use the webkit engine in quite a few apps, including Mail Designer, iSale, CoverScout and SongGenie. We'll need to tweak iSale and Mail Designer a bit to reflect the changes in Webkit's HTML output, but overall there's not too much that needs to be changed.
As you can see, stationery mails still work great with Lion - but we need to tweak Mail Designer's HTML output a bit with the free update that we'll be releasing soon.
Almost there…
It is our goal to have all equinux consumer apps Lion-ready by the time Lion is officially released in July.
If you're an early adopter and are already running the latest developer previews, feel free to let us know if you run into any issues and expect to see a few updates in the near future. We'll have more information about our pro apps, once we've had a chance to test them more thoroughly.