OSX Mountain Lion: 10.8 Due Summer 2012 (Demo Video)

by Jordan Yerman | February 16, 2012 at 10:36 am

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New Mac OSX: Mountain Lion Preview

Just as you finally got around to upgrading from Snow Leopard to Lion, Apple will be releasing a whole new verison of OSX, code-named Mountain Lion, in the summer of 2012. Developers can get their hands on a preview version of Mountain Lion right now.

Mountain Lion boasts "over 100 new features", but the upshot is that it looks more like iOS than ever before. You can see the OSX Mountain Lion Demo video below.

Features include:

Baked-in Twitter integration
Messages (sorta like Skype, also available for 10.7.3)
Gatekeeper: app installation security controls. Is this a step toward restricting what you can install, a la iOS? Someone's gotta ask.
Notification Center: like that pulldown alert system in iOS5 and Android
AirPlay mirroring for Apple TV

Also, Apple is focusing on China, at least in terms of end users if not its means of production. (Hey, at least Apple's production environment is--so far-- better than that of a Chinese garment factory: backhanded praise indeed from the early days of an assessment.)

Hopefully Mountain Lion is a bit zippier than Lion: from an end-user standpoint, OSX 10.7.3 is noticeably more sluggish than 10.6.x.

For now, this Mac user recommends staying away from Lion if you have not already installed it. That way, if there's a clean upgrade path between Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, you can skip the sluggishness that is OSX 10.7.