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In addition to iCloud — which includes Back to My Mac remote access to your Macs from other Macs over the Internet, as well as Find My Mac, which allows you to locate lost Macs on a map and remotely wipe them — the update also includes a number of other fixes. From Apple’s release notes:

• Allow reordering of desktop spaces and full screen apps in Mission Control.
• Enable dragging files between desktop spaces and full screen apps.
• Address an issue that causes the menu bar to not appear in full screen apps.
• Improve the compatibility of Google contact syncing in Address Book.
• Address an issue that causes Keynote to become temporarily unresponsive.
• Improve VoiceOver compatibility with Launchpad.
• Address an issue that causes a delay in accessing the network after waking from sleep.
• Enable booting in to Lion Recovery from a locally attached Time Machine backup drive.
• Resolve an issue that causes screen zoom to stop working.
• Improve Active Directory integration.

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All iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion users can get 5 GB of storage in iCloud for free, as Apple announced in June. But those who need a roomier cloud will also be able to pay $20 per year for 15 GB total, $40 per year for 25 GB total, or $100 per year to store 55 GB total.

Apple’s iCloud will allow iOS 5 and Lion users to sync their music, photos, apps, calendars, and more between multiple Apple devices. It won’t be officially released to the public until later this fall with the arrival of iOS 5.

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Switch spaces using the keyboard

It’s easy to switch spaces using a swipe or Mission Control, but that involves moving away from the keyboard. There is a shortcut you can turn on in System Preferences to enable switching spaces using the keyboard.

1. Open up System Preferences, either from the  menu or the Applications folder, and open the Keyboard pane by clicking its icon.
2. In the Keyboard pane, switch to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab to manage keyboard shortcuts.
3. Find Mission Control in the list on the left and click it to show the shortcuts available for Mission Control.
4. In the list on the right should be two entries, one labeled “Move left a space” and one labeled “Move right a space.” In order to enable these shortcuts, check the checkbox to the left of their names if it isn’t already checked. The default keyboard shortcuts are Control–left arrow and Control–right arrow, respectively. You can change these by double-clicking the symbol on the right of the row and typing a new shortcut.

You can now use the shortcut you selected to navigate between spaces and full-screen apps.

Switch back to a regular desktop from a full-screen app

If you want to switch between a full-screen app and a regular desktop space, you can switch left and right using a gesture or the above shortcut. But what about if you have seven or eight full-screen apps open and you don’t want to swipe through all of them?

In the same section of System Preferences as before, you should see more shortcuts labeled “Switch to Desktop 1,” “Switch to Desktop 2″ and so on, depending on the number of spaces you have enabled. You can use these shortcuts to jump straight to a normal space from any application, full-screen or otherwise. Just set them up however you would like (the default is Control and a number key), and then you’ll be able to avoid swiping across a bunch of screens.

Remap the Dashboard key to Launchpad

In Lion, Dashboard is given its own space, which is easily opened with a swipe. That means that the Dashboard key on the keyboard (F4) is not really necessary. Why not remap the Dashboard key to open Launchpad instead? That’s how new shipping keyboards and Macs work anyway. You’ll need to download a copy of FunctionFlip (free), which allows you to disable the special functions of the function keys (F1, F2, etc.) individually.

1. Once you have FunctionFlip installed, open its settings in System Preferences, which will be listed at the bottom, under Other.
2. In the drop-down list on the right, select the keyboard you’d like to change the setting for. You can always do this for every keyboard in turn.
3. Find the entry for Dashboard in the left-hand panel. It should be the fourth item from the top. Check the box to the left of it to disable the Dashboard function of the F4 key.
4. Now go back to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard pane and find Launchpad & Dock in the list on the left.
5. In the list on the right, select Show Launchpad on the right-hand side. Double-click to the right of the selected row to edit the shortcut, then press F4 on your keyboard to set the shortcut to F4.

You should now be able to launch Launchpad using the Dashboard key, rather than a gesture or the mouse.

Do you have any other time-saving Lion tips? Share them in the comments.

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Apple tested the waters for an ultraslim notebook with the original MacBook Air, and at the time, it came with a lot of trade-offs. Back in early 2008, not including an optical disc drive seemed like a very bizarre move. And while the laptop’s price ($1,799) meant that it was out of range for most consumers, it still didn’t offer the muscle necessary to appeal to professionals.

But it did accomplish three important things: It put the idea of an Apple ultraportable into the minds of the notebook-buying public; it got Apple engineers to build upon the best elements from that first design, translating it into something everyone would want and many more could buy; and it kick-started Apple’s ability to negotiate for better prices on the specialized components required to make an ultrathin MacBook.

If Apple’s ultimate goal wasn’t to emulate the Air form factor across its notebook line (even if the “Pro” designation remains for 15- and 17-inch models, as TUAW says will happen), that would be a shock. Since the Air’s original introduction, optical media has become much less necessary to consumer and professional computing. And Apple’s recent decision to go with a digital-only distribution model for OS X Lion, the major update it released last week, suggests that it wants to wean users off CDs and DVDs sooner rather than later. In fact, the Mac App Store in general strongly suggests this, as did the iTunes Store before it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had road-mapped the death of the optical drive since it figured out with the iPod that physical media is antithetical to true portability.

Apple has also shown with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch that it knows thinner and lighter are of key importance to consumers when it comes to portable devices. That approach has served it well on the mobile side, so why not apply it to notebooks as well?

Based on conversations I’ve had with Mac users, the limitations that many professionals cite when explaining why they didn’t buy an Air are few: Small screen size, lack of ports, limited storage and discrete graphics are among them. If Apple can deliver those (and space freed up from removing the optical drive should help), then an ultrathin MacBook Pro is sure to be a hit. At this stage, the only barriers to 15- and 17-inch ultraportable Mac powerhouses are technical, and those are not barriers that prevent Apple from doing anything for very long.

Consider that the 128 GB SSD option, when it was first introduced in 2008, was a $700 upgrade, along with a faster processor on the second-gen MacBook Air. The 256 GB upgrade, along with a faster processor, now costs only an extra $450 for the new 11.6-inch MacBook Air; that’s double the storage for nearly half the price of just three years ago. Apple seems much better able to manage the cost of solid-state storage, due either to smart sourcing or falling flash prices in general, and that should translate to higher-capacity options in ultraportable Pros. Plus, if Apple decides to not go quite as slim as the Air, fitting a 2.5-inch drive shouldn’t be too difficult alongside SSD customization options. Such a compromise would likely allow Apple to stay within the current price range of the larger-screened MacBook Pros, if SSD prices make that otherwise difficult.

TUAW says we’ll see these new machines possibly before Christmas. Apple doesn’t usually release new Mac hardware past October in terms of its yearly cycle, but October actually could be the perfect time for an update to the Pro line. The Pro went longer than usual without an update last time around, but in 2008 it got an update in February and then again in October. This year we saw an update in February that introduced Thunderbolt and new processors, so an October update wouldn’t be unprecedented.

I think Apple is probably quite far along in the development of these machines, and it may only be that the company is waiting and watching to see how the updated MacBook Air fares to decide whether or not the market is ready for it to embrace a similar form factor across its entire lineup. If that’s the case, then I think chances are good that we’ll see a larger, Pro-level ultraportable before 2012.

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1. Remove icons from Launchpad. Right now, the only icons you can remove from Launchpad are apps installed via the Mac App Store. If you remove the icon, the whole app is removed. In a way, this makes sense: they want to transfer the same ease-of-deletion from iOS to OS X. The problem is, if you have a ton of what Lion sees as apps — in my case, all the old World of Warcraft patches showed up in Launchpad — you’re going to have a mess. I can’t hide the apps completely, so instead I performed the digital equivalent of stuffing them in the closet. I created a single folder, moved any non-app programs into that, and stuck it on the last page in Launchpad.

2. Reveal your Home Library folder. I’m not sure why Apple hid this, but there are two ways you can get to it. The first is to go to the Finder, open the Go menu, and choose “Go to Folder.” Type in ~/Library/ and hit Enter. This will bring you to the folder. If you need to get there more than occasionally, or have an app where the hidden flag is causing problems, you can make it visible by typing in “chflags nohidden ~/Library” in the Terminal.

3. Make an app open in all spaces. This tip only works if you have multiple Desktop spaces. To add a space in Mission Control move your pointer to the upper-right hand corner and click on the large Plus icon. Then, right-click on the apps’s icon in the Dock, choose Options, and “Assign to: All spaces.” As a bonus tip, you can also create an empty space to quickly flip to an empty display if you need to.

4. Remove icons from the Sidebar. I’ve run into a few instances where dragging an icon off the Sidebar doesn’t actually remove it. If this happens, right-click the wayward icon and choose “Remove from Sidebar.” If, like me, you ended up with some Sidebar folders pointing to now nonexistent folders and can’t remove them at all, renaming the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist file in ~\Library\Preferences folder (it doesn’t matter what you rename it to) and rebooting will restore your Sidebar to default icons.

5. MobileMe Calendar syncing is now set in iCal. This one threw me at first. In Snow Leopard, you set MobileMe Calendar syncing within the MobileMe System Preferences pane. Now, it’s under iCal’s preferences under Accounts. I imagine this is because iCloud will render the MobileMe preferences pane obsolete.

These are five quick tips I’ve found to help me ease into Lion. What tips do you folks have?

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Surely it would take longer than 25 minutes for me to download Lion on an LTE connection. I don’t have LTE service to test this idea, but having used it before, my educated guess is that in an area of solid coverage, the Lion install files would take two hours or so to download over 4G, assuming Apple’s servers don’t buckle. My estimate halves the peak speeds I saw on Verizon’s network, which is around the top end of the range Verizon says its LTE customers can expect: 5 to 12 Mbps. That alone doubles the 25-minute download to 50 minutes in perfect conditions, not accounting for any peak boosts. Mobile connections aren’t as consistent as wired ones, however, so speeds fluctuate. Doubling the estimate again to account for that gets me to 1 hour and 40 minutes, which I’ll round up to two hours for other variables.

Forget the fact that most people won’t do this but will instead upgrade their operating system at home or in an Apple store. Dismiss too the data plan tiers that Verizon now offers, giving LTE customers a limited, set amount of monthly mobile bandwidth. I’m surely not recommending that people use 75 percent of their 5 GB LTE plan this month to download an operating system. Instead, I’m simply amazed that the possibility to do so even exists and that it could even be an option in areas with slow wired broadband.

Think back to when Mac OS X Cheetah launched in March 2001; it was a far different cat back then, and so too was the mobile broadband landscape. It wasn’t until seven months later that the first commercial 3G network launched by Japan’s NTT DoCoMo. And it would take years before 3G networks were deployed in a majority of the world, some of which are still in progress. We’re now in the beginnings of the 4G age, just as operating systems are no longer packaged on plastic discs but instead are piped through broadband.

No, most people won’t use mobile broadband for this download, but the idea that it’s a feasible option, particularly for those with slower DSL connections, simply amazes me. And while I agree that this distribution method is the biggest test yet for digital downloads, it also shows how fast broadband technologies are changing, partially why Apple spent billions on its data centers, and how we might use mobile broadband networks in the future.

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He told GigaOM that the actual job, which began about six months ago, involved a lot of slimming down of Skype’s native client and making it work in a browser, creating the back-end integration between Facebook and Skype and scaling up Skype’s network to handle the flood of traffic.

“We anticipate some really heavy usage, well in excess of what Skype sees today,” Rosenberg said.

Cut the client fat

The first big challenge was taking what is normally about a 20 megabyte native PC or Mac Skype client and stripping it down into a less-than-3-megabyte runtime, which works in conjunction with a JavaScript plug-in. Skype essentially ripped out much of the user interface and unneeded features of its Skype client to create a slim piece of software that could be quickly downloaded. The runtime provides some APIs, and the plug-in delivers those APIs through Javascript for access to Facebook.

Facebook’s team built the chat icons and video buttons, and it handles the download of the plug-in. Skype takes over during the actual call, logging into the plug-in and runtime and relying on its existing infrastructure to complete the call.

Where callers have no name

Rosenberg said 98 percent of Facebook video chats are identical to traditional Skype calls, save for some small rendering code for the video UI. In order to access Skype’s network, Skype actually has to create an anonymous Skype login for each Facebook video chat user, even if he has his own Skype login. A Facebook user’s identity must then be mapped to the Skype login to ensure that the call can go through.

That was something Skype spent time to get right, to make sure users were connecting to the people they intended to call and that their personal accounts were not able to be accessed by others, said Rosenberg. ”There were a lot of security things we needed to do to make sure it would just happen as users expected,” he said.

Many browsers = headaches

Getting Skype calls to work in a browser turned out to be more of a challenge, because Skype had to take into account how browsers operated. One of the biggest issues was dealing with the fact that users often can have several tabs open with Facebook. Skype had to be able to handle each instance of Facebook and ensure that the different tabbed versions were able to communicate correctly with the runtime.

“We knew this would be an issue, but it was more complicated than we thought,” Rosenberg said. “It turns out there is just a lot of concurrency use cases.”

Another issue was dealing with different browser and operating system combinations, making sure Facebook video chat would work on all configurations. That testing, along with performance tuning, took up much of the last month before Wednesday’s launch. Even now, Facebook video chat doesn’t work on Macs running the upcoming OS X Lion operating system, which was seeded last week to developers.

Scaling up behind the scenes

On the back end, Skype has bought more servers and bandwidth in its data centers to handle the extra traffic it expects. It still relies on its peer-to-peer network, the same video and audio codecs, for transport, but it needs more infrastructure to scale up reliablity for Facebook and handle the handshake between the two networks.

One key decision has been to rely completely on dedicated supernodes to facilitate Facebook video calls and to bring them all into Skype’s own data centers or into Amazon’s EC2 cloud. Supernodes select Skype clients that often sit on the public Internet, act as directories that help guide calls through the P2P network, and are usually used during recovery efforts after an outage. The fact that Skype is taking this step shows that it is serious about getting off to a good start on Facebook.

More features to come?

Skype’s integration opens up some interesting possibilites for future video chat services through Facebook. Rosenberg declined to say if Skype video chat will come to Facebook’s mobile apps or if group video chat will come to Facebook’s site. He said that Skype just rolled out its Android app and is still working on ramping that up.

But he said it’s technically possible, as is group chat for the browser. Bringing group chat to the desktop browser, however, would require an update to the runtime, which was slimmed down by pulling out features like group video calls and instant messaging. It might take a little time, but I don’t doubt that we’ll see both features come in the future. Skype CEO Tony Bates said on Wednesday that the integration was a chance to introduce Facebook users to Skype’s paid products, things like group video chat.

You can read more about the Skype-Facebook integration on Skype’s blog.

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Fluid is an OS X app that allows you to specify a website address, choose an icon, and create a site-specific browser application that does away with the browser window and leaves you with just the site itself. One popular use for Fluid is to create a Facebook app, and the recently launched Google+ is another prime candidate. Fluid is the creation of Todd Ditchendorf, a one-time Apple employee who helped develop the OS X Dashboard and Dashboard Widgets.

The 1.2 update for Fluid brings Lion compatibility for the app (developers have had access to the preview version of OS X 10.7 for some time now), and also introduces full-screen mode support for users running Lion. There’s a catch: Those who want the full-screen support will have to pay the optional $4.99 licensing fee for Fluid, which also unlocks the ability to pin apps created in Fluid to the menu bar, and enables separate cookie storage for Fluid apps.

Safari in OS X Lion boasts a full-screen mode as well, but it can’t compare to using complex web apps like Google Docs completely unencumbered by any browser chrome, since you have more usable space and less incentive to get distracted with Fluid apps. Believe me, once you get the hang of how switching between full-screen apps in Lion works (a three or four-finger swipe), you’ll really appreciate this new feature in Fluid.

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Stock shortages and third-party retail inventory systems have traditionally been a fairly accurate barometer of Apple’s hardware refreshes, especially when an update is close at hand. Best Buy’s website revealed new MacBook Pro SKUs ahead of their official release, for example, in February, when the notebooks got updated with Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors.

A MacBook Air refresh has been rumored for a while now, and part of the update is thought to be the inclusion of Sandy Bridge processor architecture. Intel recently unveiled new low-voltage Sandy Bridge chips, including a Core i5 1.7 GHz variety and two Core i7 versions, one at 1.7 GHz and the other at 1.8 GHz. Current MacBook Airs still use much older Intel Core 2 Duo processors, so the new Core series are a near-certainty for powering any new hardware.

Another change likely in store for the MacBook Air includes the addition of Thunderbolt, Apple and Intel’s new high-speed I/O port. Apple has been steadily replacing the Mini DisplayPort on its new Macs with Thunderbolt. This is because Thunderbolt can handle display output as well as data transfer functions and is compatible with Mini DisplayPort cables and adapters. Other possible additions include a FaceTime HD camera, something else that both the updated MacBook Pro and iMac got this year, and a switch to an AMD graphics processor, since Apple seems to be methodically cutting NVIDIA out of that part of its business.

An updated MacBook Air likely won’t arrive at this point before OS X Lion, which Apple has said will make its debut in July. People who purchase new Macs as of June 6 are eligible for a free upgrade to Lion, so Apple can save itself some money by just shipping new MacBook Airs with the new OS installed, instead of having to deal with the administrative costs of providing a refund. Both Lion and new Airs could ship as early as next week.

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