If you are Apple fans with iPhone/iPad, and iMac/Macbook Pro, you may be excited to see the news for the coming Mac OS X Mountain Lion. The iOS features will be available in the new Mac OS X for better experience.
The iOS features, described as "back to Mac", include iMessage (renamed as Message on new Mac OS X), Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Twitter integration, Share Sheets, Game Center, and AirPlay Mirroring.
Below are some extracts from Mac OS X Mountain Lion: A Hands-On Tour, written by Jason Snell, Macworld.
Mountain Lion will be a paid upgrade to OS X; like Lion, it will be available only via a Mac App Store download. Mac developers can download a developer release of Mountain Lion, giving them several months to update their apps to take advantage of the new features in the release.
iOS apps come to the Mac
Reminders and Notes look very much like they do on iOS. And thanks to iCloud syncing, they’ll display the same data that shows up on your mobile devices. These are still quite simple apps—the goal seems to have been to provide parity with their iOS analogs. The Notes app does support rich text, so you can choose different fonts, insert photos and attachments, create bulleted lists, and drag in URLs to create hyperlinks.
Game Center was introduced to users with iOS 4.1 in September 2010, and expanded in iOS 5. Now it comes to the Mac, letting Mac gamers find friends and compare their gaming prowess, as well as play against each other. Mac game developers get access to a centralized system for network play, opponent matching, in-game voice chat, and more. And yes, Game Center can work across platforms, so games that run on both Mac and iOS can interoperate.
iChat becomes Messages
All the features of iChat are still there, but the app’s been renamed Messages and it now supports iMessage (and is now integrated with FaceTime). You can use Messages to send text or images to anyone on a device capable of using iMessage—namely, devices running iOS 5, and Macs running Messages. Unlike SMS text messages, the iMessage system transfers data via the Internet, so there are no text charges.
There’s good news on that front: Apple says that Lion users will be able to download a beta version of Messages. The final version will be available in Mountain Lion.
Enter Notification Center
With Mountain Lion, Mac OS X gains a system-level notification system accessible to every developer, with features much like those already found in iOS. Alerts appear in the top right corner of the screen in a small bubble. Notifications remain there for five seconds, and then slide off screen to the right. Alerts, on the other hand, remain on-screen until you click on the Show or Close (or in the case of some alerts, Snooze) buttons.
In iOS 5, you see all your recent notifications by pulling down from the top of the screen to reveal Notification Center. In Mountain Lion, the Notification Center list is a narrow band that lives just to off the right side of your screen. You can reveal it either by clicking on the new Notification Center icon at the far right of the menu bar, or by swiping with two fingers starting at the far right edge of the trackpad. Either way, your Mac’s entire screen will slide to the left, revealing a list of what’s been trying to get your attention recently.
Gatekeeper blocks apps… the first time
Right now, OS X checks an app the first time it launches, and displays a warning. It’s an attempt to prevent malware apps from launching when you never intended them to. In Mountain Lion, that feature has been extended and tied into a new setting in the Security & Privacy pane of System Preferences.
By default, Mountain Lion will only let Mac App Store apps and Apps from “identified developers” launch for the first time. To become an “identified developer,” Mac developers have to register with Apple and get a personalized certificate, which they then use to cryptographically sign their apps. Apple doesn’t do any sort of background check on the developer, and it doesn’t see any of the software.
Original posted at:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/250113/mac_os_x_mountain_lion_a_handson_tour.html
Get more info from Apple Official site for the new features in Mountain Lion:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/features.html
