Apple Reveals Mountain Lion

Apple gives us a sneak peak of the next OS in the animal kingdom of Mac OS X operating systems. They're bringing a lot of features from IOS to the mac, which makes sense, now that Apple has iCloud. Sharing files and data between systems becomes much more seamless, when the user experience gets unified.

iMessage on the mac, finally.

When Apple first announced iMessage, the first thing that came to my mind was how cool it would be if this would also integrate with iChat. What they're doing now, is completely replace iChat with iMessage. Although that only applies to the name. What they're actually doing is effectively merging the two applications, as iChat features such as chatting using Jabber and Google Talk will still be available. You can download the beta version of iMessage for Lion here. A minor detail, is that I'm not entirely sure wether they'll call the app 'Messages' or 'iMessage', as Apple uses them both in the sneak peak.

Synching is a hard problem.

Apple is also focusing on better integration of iCloud in the OS, so you can easily synch documents and data between different devices. Synching is a hard problem. Apple has always made it seem as if your computer is the canonical source of your documents. But this model gets harder when 'your computer' could apply to multiple desktops. I therefore hope, that they'll combine 'versions' from lion, with a more dropbox-like model, where changes are pushed to the cloud, and the cloud becomes the canonical source. I hope that the increasing role the cloud plays in Apple's products, will not strain their servers too much, but judging by the size of their data center, that won't be a problem (see video)

Don't forget to install that new OS with Reminders

Reminders, the app that helps IOS 5 users to get around the symptoms of early alzheimer, now comes to the mac as well. You can keep multiple lists of things you need to do, set due dates so that you receive notifications, when the deadline approaches. I hope they also integrate this with iCal, so that the due dates for reminders are shown there as well. You won't forget anything, even when you're on the go, as reminders are also synched using iCloud.

A Note-worthy OS

Mac OS x already had a notes application, but now, they're shaping the experience, to resemble notes on IOS, although the ability to stick notes anywhere on your desktop remains. There are also man more options for formatting, so you can add links, lists, images,... And it's all synched to the cloud.

Growl is not good enough, bring in the notification center.

The system of notifications popping up in the top right corner of your screen, has existed for quite some years now, it's called growl. Now, Apple is using the same, or a similar system to show alerts, but you can get an overview of all notifications that have popped up, in the notification center. Swipe to the right on your desktop to open it. Third party applications will also be able to add notifications to the list, but keeping the Facebook ticker in mind, I hope application developers, especially for social applications, won't overuse or abuse this feature.

Share what you like.

Sharing has been made easier in mountain Lion. The twitter integration in IOS 5 has been extended to the mac, and you'll also be able to easily share potos to flickr and videos to vimeo. I find it strange that Apple doesn't mention YouTube when it come to sharing video. Could this be because of Apple's sometimes rather negative relationship with google, strongly examplified by the discussion of Steve Jobs and Erir Schmidt, mentioned in the Steve Jobs bio? I also noticed that in the screenshot in the section about sharing, safari doesn't have a search box anymore. Dos this mean that safari finally gets an omnibar? I most certainly hope so, it might make me switch back from Chrome.

Who says the mac is not for gamers?

Game Center also comes to the mac, enabling game developers to have a nice high scores, achievements and multiplayer system, even with players on multiple platforms, although I'm afraid that the cross platform multiplayer option will mostly be used by turn-based games, as controlling a character or vehicle works significantly different on a toch screen, than using the arrow keys and mouse. I do hope that the game center will bring both more gamers and more games to the mac App store.

Keep your mac safer, and give Apple more money too.

Mountain Lion has an application called GateKeeper, which controls which apps you can download and run. You can set it to being able to download and install any apps, as you can do with Lion, you can set it to only accept apps associated with a 'trusted' Developer account, or you can set it to only allow only apps from the App Store. Off course, apple describes this as the safest setting. I'm usually not a conspiracy theorist, but to me, this feels very much like apple trying to lock customers into the apple ecosystem. I sincerely hope, that we won't have to jailbreak our laptops in the future, in order to install our favourite torrent client, virtual machine software,... The less safe option, of just checking apps for a developer ID will also bring in enough cash, as the developer program costs $99/year, a price which I'm not willing to pay at this point, although I might do this in the future. This also means that my opinions stated here, are formed based on what's written on the website. I have a free version of the developer account, but that doesn't allow me to download the developer preview :(.

中国苹果

Apple is also changing the user experience for their Chinese users. I quote Apple here, as my knowledge of the Chinese services is too limited to say anything useful about it.

OS X Mountain Lion brings all-new support for many popular Chinese services. And they’re easy to set up. Mail, Contacts, and Calendar work with QQ, 163, and 126. Baidu, the leading Chinese search provider, is a built-in option in Safari. The video-sharing websites Youku and Tudou are included in the new Share Sheets, so users in China can easily post videos to the web. They can also blog with Sina weibo, the popular microblogging service. And with improved text input, typing in Chinese is easier, faster, and more accurate.

I'm looking forward to the summer.

Not only because I like the sun much better than the slippery ice and snow, but also because that's the time this new OS will be released. I'm looking forward to playing around with all the new apps, but I'll be setting my GateKeeper settings to the least secure ones, I want to continue using my open source software.