Apple OS X Mountain Lion: Top 15 New Features
By Peter Pachal.
Apple just unveiled the next major upgrade to its core software, OS X. It's called Mountain Lion, and it's a doozy, bringing a lot of the features its customers use ever day on iPhones and iPads over to the Mac. Apple says Mountain Lion has 100 new features, from tiny details in the Safari web browser to wholesale changes in how instant messaging works.
Curious about what's different? The general public will have to wait until summer to download the release for themselves, but in the meantime you can explore the Top 15 most important new features in the gallery above. Throughout all of them, though, you'll find two distinct trends:
The continued migration of mobile features to the Mac experience.
iCloud playing a greater role on the Mac.
When Apple first unveiled Mac OS X Lion back in 2010, it was a paradigm shift for computers. Mobile technology had been - and still is - evolving extremely fast, and more fundamentally was becoming much more integrated with peoples' day-to-day lives. It only made sense to take the best features of mobile (full-screen experiences, integrated sharing, a launch center for apps, etc.) and bring them to the desktop.
Mountain Lion continues this transition. Apps familiar to iOS users get ported to the desktop, and most feature seamless syncing with their mobile counterparts.
Which brings us to iCloud. The cloud-syncing service introduced last year is playing a greater role in Mountain Lion, and so it should. Keeping track of what you're doing on which device is a task no one wants - much better to simply take the whole experience with you no matter what machine is in front of you. The new version of OS X brings that functionality to a ton more apps.
For all the new stuff in Mountain Lion, however, it's worth pointing out a notable absence: Siri. Apple makes no mention of its famous voice assistant in its overview of the new OS and has remained mum on why. Is it because Macs simply don't have the same system-on-a-chip technology that the iPhone 4S includes? The investigation continues…
In the meantime, please browse OS X Mountain Lion's many new features, and tell us which ones you're really looking for to (or could do without) in the comments.
In a twist, new Mac software now inspired by mobile operating systems
By Marty Gabel.
It used to be that we'd want our smartphones to be more like the laptops or PC computers we use every day. Originally, most of us were amazed that we could have at least some kind of computer within the palm of our hand. This is what Apple's iPhone and Android devices now provide, especially when running a huge variety of amazing and powerful apps.
In today's Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook is now aiming for the opposite - he wants the Mac to be more like the iPhone, not the other way around. A new version of Mac OS X was unveiled (in fact, the company is dropping the whole 'Mac' moniker and going with just OS X) codenamed 'Mountain Lion.'
This next generation operating system, released to developers as a beta version, demonstrates further alignment between the smartphone and desktop world. In the article, Tim Cook is quoted as saying "We see that people are in love with a lot of apps and functionality here … Anywhere where that makes sense, we are going to move that over to Mac."
Apps seem to be the, erm, killer app here, that's for sure, and it's clear that Apple is thinking of a future where the Mac computer OS X and the iPhone's iOS coexist far more intimately. While all kinds of devices will continue to be manufactured, and probably maintain their unique characteristics, we'll see far more similarities in the software look, feel and apps they run.
One new feature of OS X Mountain Lion is its AirPlay capabilities. Current Apple iPhone and iPad users may already be familiar with this technology. AirPlay helps make sharing content between devices, whether they be laptops, phones or 'smart' TVs, even easier. Now that that capability will be extended to all the hardware in Apple's arsenal we're likely to see even closer synergy between every device in the connected home or office.
Soon the app itself will be the key. Whether you're using it from a smartphone or a laptop is unlikely to be so important.
Mozilla offers Gaia UI first look, will reveal Boot to Gecko partners at MWC
By James Trew.
Mozilla surprised us last summer when it announced plans for its Boot to Gecko mobile OS. Now, it looks like the project has some industry support, with CTO Brenden Eich tweeting that the company will make a partner announcement at MWC this month. There are no details right now as to who might be involved, but given that developer support is already there (the operating system is based on existing web standards, after all), the hopes are that this could indicate vital operator, or even hardware manufacturer backing. Another encouraging development is the first sighting of the platform's Gaia UI, further suggesting the project might well meet its planned Q2 release target. It doesn't stray too far from the Android / iOS model that we're already familiar with, but give the source link a swipe if you want to see more.
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