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).
If you like beautifully designed interfaces that focus on usability through the creator’s deep understanding of good typographic principles, Microsoft continues to impress*.
It’s a shame that Apple, formerly the company whose products you used if you preferred well-rendered type, would rather focus on pixel-painting. The same Apple that once said, “A word can paint a thousand pixels,” seem to have forgotten their own mantra. Words, when used correctly in interfaces, can communicate far more in far less time.
To the fanboys who are about to protest about how Apple are the deity of interface design, remember that Apple’s default font of choice for their notes application is Marker Sans, a Comic Sans clone. Don’t even try to argue that one.
Before you light your torches and sharpen your pitchforks, I’d like to make it clear that I’m not saying that iOS and OS X are bad OSes. Far from it. As a consumer, both of them ‘just work’ and, thanks to the initial success of the iPhone hardware (remember that for the first year, there was no App Store for iOS), Apple were spurred into releasing a terrific SDK for developers. We’re now blessed with a rich development community that builds and integrates experiences into every digital point in your life across all your shiny Apple toys**. What I’m saying is that as a designer, type fan and developer of applications, it would be terrific if they could spend a little more time creating tools that allow for better typographic principles, wider font choices*** and clearer rendering.
Video Via Engadget, More details at AllThingsDigital
*Yup. This from the company that thought it was fine to use Arial as a substitute for Helvetica in their OS. How times have changed.
**I much prefer Apple’s industrial design and packaging to their software aesthetic. One simple, reduced, pure; the other pushing skeuomorphic nonsense on a generation that have never used the original (I’m looking at you address book). The two are at odds.
***Why haven’t Apple created a Typekit for iOS?
iCloud.com goes live (For developers only at this time)
Pricing:
- 5 GB - Free
- +10 GB - $20/y
- +20 GB - $40/y
- +50 GB - $100/y
Purchased music, apps, books etc don’t count towards your quota. In other words, when you back up your iOS device, you’re not eating through your yearly allocation in one gulp.
Via MacRumors
New features in OS X Lion
Just installed Lion? Read through this list.
Via Daring Fireball
Moom - The window manager for OS X that will change your life. In their words:
Moom allows you to easily move and zoom windows to predefined areas of the screen, or to make them full-screen, using either the mouse or the keyboard.
When used via the mouse, all you need to do is hover over the green resize button in any Mac OS X window. Moom’s panel appears, and you then click the desired action.
When used via the keyboard, a hot key displays the Moom bezel, and you can then use the arrow and modifier keys to move and resize the windows.
Note: OS X Lion will be adding Resume, a window management system that remembers the state of your application when you last openend it; what file was open, what position your windows and toolbars were in. Together with Moom, your productivity is going to skyrocket.
Apple…We get it. It looks like a leather-bound calendar so it must be a calendar (OS X 10.7 Lion gets some interface updates in the latest developer preview).
Apple, you confuse me.
On the outside
Apple hardware: Beautiful, simple, elegant. Form = function.
On the Inside
Apple software: The pages of a book on design principles, torn up, and mixed in a bucket with Skittles and Lego*.
Yes, you’re meant to engage people’s senses, but do you remember typography? Do you remember information design? The content is the design. The data should engage. People shouldn’t be distracted by pixel painting. Painted pixels should act as sign-posts, not billboards.
*No offense to Skittles, or Lego, but we’re grown ups.
OS X Lion, Apple’s latest Mac operating system set for release this summer, gets some minor interface tweaks.
