Apple surprised everyone with a stealth reveal of the next iteration of its Mac operating system yesterday. In a break from past announcements via lengthy keynotes, Apple invited a number of technology journalists to see the newly dubbed OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion–note the lack of “Mac” in the title–and the embargo lapsed yesterday morning revealing an even more iOS-like desktop OS.
Here are the bullet point features:
Notification Center
This will be a common sentiment, but this feature comes straight out of iOS. New notifications will result in a banner that will slide away after 5 seconds, and a full list of notifications will be found in a new sliding drawer on the right side of the desktop. The presentation and functionality is almost exactly as it is in iOS.
Messages
iChat is finally gone. Messages bring iOS iMessage functionality to the desktop delivering all of the functionality of it’s mobile counterparts while retaining the IM features of iChat. Text message equivalents can now be sent and received straight from the desktop, and messages will be received in all locations attached to the same Apple ID. Messages is available now to Lion users as a beta release.
iCloud
The release of Lion brought rudimentary iCloud support to the desktop, but Mountain Lion iCloud support is integrating the cloud service in a deeper, more functional way. Documents are now part of the mix and will makes sure that Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and other third party apps that support iCloud will have their files available across devices.
Game Center
Apple is bringing its gaming social network to the Mac in Mountain Lion as well. It will support everything the iOS version does–online multiplayer, asynchronous play, leaderboards, friends, and more–and cross-platform play wil also be introduced to the mix.
AirPlay
Throwing a wireless video signal from an iPad or iPhone to an Apple TV has been a favorite feature of many since its introduction in iOS 5, and now it will be available on the desktop. The Mac version of AirPlay will allow users to wirelessly mirror their desktop to an Apple TV via a toggle in the taskbar. Resolution will be capped at 720p per the current Apple TV’s specifications, but output resolutions will be dynamically scaled.
Gatekeeper, Notes, Share Sheets, Reminders, and Twitter
There are a number of other small additions coming to Mountain Lion including system-level Twitter integration, a broken-out notes app, a Reminders app, iOS-style share sheets for sharing via social networks, and a new app certification protocol called Gatekeeper.
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These are the marque features that have been revealed, but more may come as Mountain Lion is still up to six months away from release. Apple has stated that it is moving OS X to a yearly update schedule so that its mobile and desktop operating systems can approach feature parity on similar timelines–presumably with OS X updates in the summer and iOS updates in the fall.
Outside of the official video, The Verge also put together a nice video showing off what’s new in Mountain Lion:
Source: Apple
