Macworld — Lion is coming in July to a Mac App Store near you. And because we just can’t wait for it to be king, we’ve provided some information about just what you can expect when the big cat makes its big debut. We’ve already covered five things your Mac will be able to do; now, let’s take a look at some of the new features you’ll notice in your Apple (AAPL) applications.

1. Create signatures and sign documents in Preview

Try as we might, we can’t seem to kick the habit of faxing documents: Like it or not, technology’s least-glamorous mailing system still has a few tricks companies, rental agencies, and banks prefer over the computer—signing documents, for example. If Apple has its way, though, using a fax machine to send your signature may soon be going the way of the dodo, thanks to a new built-in option in Preview.

OS X’s built-in PDF annotation and reader software gains a Signature Capture option that allows you to virtually scan in signatures using your iSight camera; the signatures are then vectorized and placed in Preview’s Signature annotation option, where you can drop them in on any form you like and resize them accordingly.

2. Follow the full conversation in Mail

Mail has gotten a huge overhaul in Lion—so much so that Apple even highlighted during this month’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote as one of the OS update’s ten biggest new features. Inside the revamped application, there’s plenty to love, but one feature in particular may come as a stand-out for Gmail browser holdouts: viewing related conversations.

Mail in Lion offers conversation view by default, allowing you to track replies within any given thread, but if you’re the type who likes to keep your email organized, you’ll find that once you sort a letter out of your inbox, you’ll lose it in the chain. No longer: Enable a checkbox in Lion, and any email threads you look at will contain all messages, no matter their location in Mail. This even includes your Sent folder, so you can see your own replies in a given thread.

3. Make your Mac a photo booth

Briefly demonstrated on-stage at the WWDC keynote, Apple’s Photo Booth application has received a couple of neat new animation effects—like Dizzy, which displays a motion-tracking group of cartoon birds flying around the top of your skull, or Lovestruck, which emanates a series of floating hearts from your person—but the biggest change has been the addition of full-screen mode.

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