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Mountain Lion


Jeff Wexler

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Developer's preview of Mountain Lion has been released and looks to have a number of really useful features incorporated, most seeming to further integrate with iCloud. As always, Apple is able to provide a level of integration along with ease of use that no other tech company can accomplish because Apple controls both the hardware and software and provides integrated Cloud functions on their own servers.

- excerpted:

Apple today released a developer preview of OS X Mountain Lion, the ninth major release of the world's most advanced operating system, which brings popular apps and features from iPad to the Mac and accelerates the pace of OS X innovation. Mountain Lion introduces Messages, Notes, Reminders and Game Center to the Mac, as well as Notification Center, Share Sheets, Twitter integration and AirPlay Mirroring. Mountain Lion is the first OS X release built with iCloud in mind for easy setup and integration with apps.

The developer preview of Mountain Lion features the all new Messages app which replaces iChat and allows you to send unlimited messages, high-quality photos and videos directly from your Mac to another Mac or iOS device. Messages will continue to support AIM, Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. Starting today Lion users can download a beta of Messages from www.apple.com, and the final version will be available with Mountain Lion. Reminders and Notes help you create and track your to-dos across all your devices. Game Center lets you personalize your Mac gaming experience, find new games and challenge friends to play live multiplayer games, whether they're on a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.


Mountain Lion presents notifications in an elegant new way, and Notification Center provides easy access to alerts from Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, system updates and third party apps. System-wide Share Sheets make it easy to share links, photos and videos directly from Apple and third party apps. Twitter is integrated throughout Mountain Lion so you can sign on once and tweet directly from Safari, Quick Look, Photo Booth, Preview and third party apps. Mountain Lion also introduces AirPlay Mirroring, an easy way to wirelessly send a secure 720p video stream of what's on your Mac to an HDTV using Apple TV.


More than 100 million users have iCloud accounts, and Mountain Lion makes it easier than ever to set up iCloud and access documents across your devices. Mountain Lion uses your Apple ID to automatically set up Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime and Find My Mac. The new iCloud Documents pushes any changes to all your devices so documents are always up to date, and a new API helps developers make document-based apps work with iCloud.


Gatekeeper is a revolutionary new security feature that gives you control over which apps can be downloaded and installed on your Mac. You can choose to install apps from any source, just as you do on a Mac today, or you can use the safer default setting to install apps from the Mac App Store, along with apps from developers that have a unique Developer ID from Apple. For maximum security, you can set Gatekeeper to only allow apps from the Mac App Store to be downloaded and installed.


Mountain Lion also has features specifically designed to support Chinese users, including significant enhancements to the Chinese input method and the option to select Baidu search in Safari. Mountain Lion makes it easy to set up Contacts, Mail and Calendar with top email service providers QQ, 126 and 163. Chinese users can also upload video via Share Sheets directly to leading video websites Youku and Tudou, and system-wide support for Sina weibo makes microblogging easy.

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Me too... I am anticipating something good. Let's hope!

Also, looks like Apple is going to drop "Mac" from the official name for the Next (no pun intended) operating system.

Apple Officially Drops 'Mac' Name from OS X Mountain Lion

Thursday February 16, 2012 9:50 am PST by Jordan Golson

With the launch of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in the middle of last year, Apple was clearly trending towards dropping the 'Mac' From 'Mac OS X', which has been the name of the Macintosh operating system for more than 10 years.

Though it still used the 'Mac OS X' naming scheme in press releases, Apple called the new system 'OS X Lion' on both the main product webpage and the Mac App Store product page [Direct Link].

aboutthismac.jpg

As The Verge points out, Apple has completed the transition to 'OS X' across both the Mountain Lion product pages, and the press release announcing the developer preview.

We confirmed the official name change with Apple, who told us that the preferred full name is "OS X Mountain Lion".

The Macintosh (as Tim Cook prefers to call it) brand is still alive and well, though Apple seems to be focusing that term on hardware, instead of software.

Lion was the beginning of a unification of sorts between the Mac OS and iOS. It was, as Steve Jobs put it, what would happen if a MacBook Air and an iPad "hooked up". iOS is based on Mac OS X and, at a fundamental level, there are more similarities than differences between the two operating systems. Dropping 'Mac' completely from the name of the OS solidifies the subtle, but important, distinction between hardware and software.

OS X Mountain Lion is expected to be released later this year.

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I like the ideas there.... But not the "default security setting" that you can only install programs directly from Apple or anyone that they have blessed with a dev number. This is a not-very-subtle swipe of the claws at the jailbreaking dev community. Im not more than a beneficiary of those who are constantly working to unlock the full power of the hardware... But I don't like how they continue to erect new fences around their walled garden.

--sigh--

I'm sure I will end up with it, and enjoy the features that are useful... But I will also deign to prune the hedge of that garden a bit and remove the "forced" apps that I do NOT find useful. (I'm looking at YOU, game center)

iPhone 3GS, iPad 1, macpro tower, MacBook pro... All jailbroken, unlocked, rooted... And rocking at full power.

(posted from a tethered JB iPad through T-Mobile)

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I'm not more than a beneficiary of those who are constantly working to unlock the full power of the hardware... But I don't like how they continue to erect new fences around their walled garden.

That's why we/they call it a walled garden. The Mac has never been for tweakers or people who like to look and work "under the hood", this has always been the big objection from a whole group of people who prefer to use hardware running Windows or Linux or something else. But the masses have spoken, loudly with their minds, their souls and their wallets, and products from Apple have never been more in demand than they are today... except for the demand we will see tomorrow or next month when they release the "next greatest thing".

It has always been a trade-off: give the computer user lots of freedom to do things the way they decide they want to work, and risk the inevitable melt-down and total loss of function when it turns out that THEY actually know better than YOU... or, build things on the model of the "walled garden" you speak of and most everything will "just work" as it is supposed to for the majority of users.

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You will be able to run 10.6 for a very, very long time... no one is even going to bother to pry anything away from you. I have a couple of older Macs that still work great, running OS 9! The thing is, you won't be able to make use of many of the new features and functions that will only be supported by current operating systems. If that's okay with you, then you will be able to continue to chug along quite nicely with 10.6.

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And if you don't want to "integrate" your Mac with everything else? I'm still using OSX 10.6 on my Macs because 1) it works, 2) it still has Rosetta and 3) I don't like being forced to use iCloud...

If you're a MobileMe user, you'll have to go to iCloud after June 30, 2012. For those of us in a multi-machine environment, that's a change we'l have to make. I'm trying to figure out how I'll go. I did a 3 partition system for a while, with Windows 7, 10.6 and 10.7 but never used 10.7 much other than to try. I dumped the Lion partition when I replaced my laptop's drive recently but I may have to bring it back, mostly to avoid updating ProTools (and making my M-Box interface a brick) which I use a few times a year for playback gigs. The other option is to clone Snow Leopard off to an external drive but that could be problematic.

Best regards,

Jim

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Apple will run out of big cat names pretty soon.

Did they do Jaguar yet?..or will they have issues with the car company if they try that. There are lesser known exotic cats, like the Marguay, Lynx, Bobcat, and other small cats, but they don't "seem" as impressive as a lion.

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You will be able to run 10.6 for a very, very long time... no one is even going to bother to pry anything away from you. I have a couple of older Macs that still work great, running OS 9! The thing is, you won't be able to make use of many of the new features and functions that will only be supported by current operating systems. If that's okay with you, then you will be able to continue to chug along quite nicely with 10.6.

My concern, is that they drop support for older products and operating systems way too quickly. As a part time post-soundie, I will have a big issue if I have no other option than to store or access my files only via the cloud...

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My concern, is that they drop support for older products and operating systems way too quickly. As a part time post-soundie, I will have a big issue if I have no other option than to store or access my files only via the cloud...

When you look at the evolution and upgrade paths for all our computer based stuff, you really need to define what "support" means. In the hardware/software jargon, when something has "support" (whether it is software or hardware) it means that it will work under the new system or the new hardware. If by support you mean you can get a person or a company to help you get something working that isn't working, that's a different story. Also, there is no indication that with Mountain Lion you will be forced to save everything to cloud storage... what will be introduced in Mountain Lion is a function where saving to iCloud will be an integral part of the Save, Save As, routines.

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Honestly, if there was an easy way to copy the CF card from my recorder to a thumb drive and do a report as PDF on my iPad I would never bring my laptop to set again. Now Protools and Media Composer, thats another story. I know post houses still running Protools 7 or 8 just because they now it works and know it's quirks..

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I understand why people are nervous about change in their operating systems - but things always seem to get worked out. This version update, however, is extremely necessary for what seems to be a seamless transition between the iOS devices and the mac. Having the iCloud integration with apps (especially PAGES AND NUMBERS) is going to incredible!

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I'm in the same dilemma as Jim.

I own PT 8.01 with the first version of the M Box and a Digi 02 Rack. I'm on OS 10.5.8 now.

To get the advantage of iCloud, I would have to upgrade my Mac to Snow Leopard and then to Lion. The OS upgrades are inexpensive.

Sadly, that would make both my M-Box, Digi 02 and Pro Tools LE inoperable. An upgrade of both the PT hardware and software ain't cheap.

Oh, the price of progress.

Right now I'm going to stick with my OS and will probably bite the bullet sometime in May, before Mobileme comes to an end.

Suggestions are welcome.

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Dropbox syncs cross platform... Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Quite easy and automatic and free. And if they haven't changed it since a couple weeks ago, there may still be a way to upgrade the free 2 gig account to 7+ gigs if anyone cares to know. I'm up to 7.5 gigs right now.

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Be advised that the other biggie with Lion is loss of support for Quicken! Intuit, sucky company that they have always been, have announced that they will have a Lion compatible version available sometime in the future. I know a lot of people who were unaware of Lion dropping Rosetta (emulation software built into Snow Leopard to support older applications) and found that they had no access to Quicken (and this can be years and years of financial data). The workarounds were not pretty and in some cases not even possible.

Regarding Dropbox, yes it is very good and even the FREE account is fairly generous storage, but this only helps replace iDisk (which will go away when the MobileMe goes away). All the integrated syncing and other features of iCloud cannot be accomplished with Dropbox. For all of these things to work you will need to upgrade to Lion.

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Jeff brings up something I had forgotten about completely, the Intuit/Quicken conundrum. I did a little shopping around on Amazon and Quicken Essentials is available for $20 and QuickBooks for Mac is available as a download for $100. Both are Lion compatible, so it's a question of if either will do for my needs. QuickBooks for me is a little like using a 28 oz. framing hammer to put up a picture hanger, but at least the download is less than $230. I need to read up on both Essentials and QuickBooks to see if they're at all what I need.

For the ProTools LE/M Box solution, since I use it so infrequently I'm leaning to a SSD. They are available in a size that should work for the purpose for not egregious money, less than $150. A full install of OS 10.6, PT LE and the rest of the stuff that could prove handy for playback (Wave Agent, AudialHub, Switch, Audio Hijack Pro, etc.) should fit with room to spare on an 80 GB drive. The question then becomes external enclosure or optical drive bay as a place for it to live. My head hurts!

Best regards,

Jim

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Jeff brings up something I had forgotten about completely, the Intuit/Quicken conundrum. I did a little shopping around on Amazon and Quicken Essentials is available for $20 and QuickBooks for Mac is available as a download for $100. Both are Lion compatible, so it's a question of if either will do for my needs. QuickBooks for me is a little like using a 28 oz. framing hammer to put up a picture hanger, but at least the download is less than $230. I need to read up on both Essentials and QuickBooks to see if they're at all what I need.

Jim

I have spent a huge amount of time with ALL the personal finance management programs, looking for alternatives to Quicken and Quickbooks. I will not bore everyone here with all the details but I will advise, consult and commiserate with anyone who wants to regarding iBank, MoneyDance, Money, iCash, Checkbook Pro, SEE Finance, etc., etc. What I am running on this year, what I have settled into, is Quicken Essentials for personal accounts, Quickbooks for the company/corporate accounts. Both are solid programs from the company I hate, both have little annoying things that will never change, but both are Lion compatible and get the job done. I will add that Quicken Essentials is quite different than the older long running Quicken and I think it may be missing some vital features and functions that some people need (integration with banking, portfolio tracking, etc.).

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