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![]() The final version will ship with Mountain Lion in the summer. Good news: Apple is actually releasing Messages as a public beta today on. And, of course, SMS won’t work with Messages, it’s iMessage-only. So, for example, you can’t send an iMessage to an AIM users and hope to continue that coversation on your phone later. One thing you can’t do is message between the various services to iMessage. You can still hook up AIM, Google Talk, Jabber, and Yahoo Messenger by default. Yes, the good old IM protocols still work as well. You can also FaceTime right from within the app. You can drag and drop both photos and videos from OS X to send them to iMessage users on iOS. The best elements of iMessages now come over to Messages, including delivery and read receipts. Apple says there are already over 100 million registered iMessage users and that 26 billion iMessages have been sent since the iOS 5 launch in October. Heavy iMessage users are going to love this. But the focus now is on a unified dashboard of all your messages, meaning yes, iMessages as well as IM messages. It technically replaces iChat, but with some tweaks, you can find that old interface as well. This is a new app built right into the OS itself. You can change something on your Mac and almost instantly, the change will happen to an open document in iOS as well. Again, very iOS-like.Īnd the editing process between Mountain Lion and iOS 5 is seamless. And you can create folders of documents simply by dragging one on top of another. In the Document Library, you’ll actually now see a realtime list of all your documents stored in iCloud sorted by application. With OS X Mountain Lion, the circle is complete as all documents in the iWork suite of apps will save this way as well. In iOS 5, apps like Pages take advantage of automatic saving to iCloud. One key addition is Documents in the Cloud. Actually, from the first screen in the setup assistant, you’ll now be asked to set up iCloud. With Mountain Lion, the connection is much deeper. But they were tacked on after the initial release. With Lion, iCloud had a number of points of integration. Much like they did with OS X Lion, Apple is focusing on ten key ones (though there are dozens of other changes).Īpple says there are now over 100 million iCloud accounts. To be fair, while Snow Leopard mainly focused on improvements in speed and size, Mountain Lion actually packs a bunch of new features. Instead, they view it as the next step towards a more unified Apple ecosystem. My sense is that the same is true here - and again, hence the naming - but Apple isn’t really positioning it that way. If you recall, Apple positioned it to be a smaller upgrade to OS X Leopard (10.5), hence the naming convention. The best way to think of OS X Mountain Lion may be to think back to OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). And the plan is to release the new OS sometime this coming summer. With that in mind, Apple will be releasing a developer preview of Mountain Lion today to Mac developers. To be clear, it’s not quite complete yet, but it’s already fairly polished. But given how quickly iOS development is moving, Apple wants to make sure OS X can keep up.įor the past week, I’ve been using an initial demo version of OS X Mountain Lion. Yes, Apple is already ready to show off the next version of OS X - technically 10.8 - just seven months after the last version was released.Īctually, it hasn’t even been a full seven months. Today, that transition continues with OS X Mountain Lion. With OS X Lion (aka OS X 10.7), the company started taking some of what they had learned from iOS, and the iPad specifically, and putting it in their more mature OS. On July 20 of last year, Apple began a journey.
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