After seeing the kids off to school and wife to work with peck and a smile, an unexpected visitor arrived at my door. Scruffy, an American Kennel Club certified feature retriever, showed up unbidden bearing screen caps and text descriptions of a new feature in Apple’s upcoming Mac operating system rewrite.

According to the information provided by Scruffy, one of the niftier completely rewritten features in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is “About This Mac.” Yes, it still tells you all about your Mac’s hardware configuration and the installed software, but it now includes a lot of new information, as well as a spiffy graphical user interface.

This feature is a re-design of “About This Mac” and has been completely altered with new views which display graphical information on displays, storage devices, memory usage along with other hardware information — Wikipedia

As you can see from the provided screen cap (above), About This Mac now offers an idevice style breakdown of what’s stored on the hard disks inside and connected to a Mac. There’s also a handy dandy button for calling up Disk Utility, Apple’s hard disk monitoring and maintenance app.

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You also can get one-click views of what memory is installed in which slots, as well as a quick presentation of the displays. These two items would certainly be better if more information was provided, though the one-click access to “Memory Upgrade instructions” and “Display Preferences” are nice touches.

There’s also one-click access to support documents (i.e. hardware manual, OS X mans, Knowledge Base articles, etc.) and the available service options for that particular Mac.

Yes, of course, the traditional System Profiler — now called “System Report” — is still in there with its full listing of Mac minutia, from Mac address to Boot ROM version and Installed Software to FireWire Bus info.

A dog on a mission…

Though Scruffy, the Feature Retriever, didn’t bring much, but I have to say About This Mac puts just about all of the info, or direct access thereto, I might need into a single interface and I’m liking it.

Has Scruffy (Tip — Scratch him behind the ears) visited your home or office? Dish a little in the comments below on what you like, and not, in Apple’s OS X 10.7 Lion Developer Preview…