Mountain Lion
Extensive coverage from Macworld
Interesting highlights:
- They’ve dropped the ‘Mac’ from the name. from now on, it’s officially just ‘OS X’ (still pronounced ‘Ten’)
- The release schedule - iOS and OS X will both have summer releases from now on; the idea being feature parity between a lot of the basic apps (calendar, reminders, etc)
- Messages is the desktop equivalent of iMessage and replaces iChat on the desktop. Send free texts to anyone with an iOS device running iOS 5 from your desktop. I can’t, for the life of me, work out why FaceTime is still a separate app. Download the beta, free, now.
- To-dos will be vanishing from iCal and moving to their own app, just like Reminders on iOS. Sorry to all the To Do apps out there.
- Notes will be vanishing from Mail and moving to their own app (Wonder how Evernote feels about the new Notes features?)
- Notification Center for the desktop - Sorry to the folks at Growl.
- Gatekeeper - One more step in the right direction for stopping Trojans. Trojans are essentially virus-like executable, malicious programs that are accidentally installed by the user - Macs still don’t have actual viruses (self installing, self-propogating). If your computer is acting funky, it’s because of something you have installed. Dummy.
- AirPlay - Send content (including your desktop) to other iOS devices. Yes, this should mean you can send Hulu from your Mac to your Apple TV (unless they block certain media types). And yes, I’ll refer back to my post from 2010 and the launch of the Apple TV 2; hopefully they’ll replace awful workplace projectors (point 4).
