So Apple surprised everyone today and announced OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (they dropped the name Mac from the OS today), with over 100 new features (according to Apple). Now, there are some things that are obviously new, but to me, some are more exiting than the others.
- Documents in the cloud – I haven’t purchased any of the iWorks apps for iOS because the process of getting them from iOS to Mac, and vice versa, was clunky at best. And also, there is no easy way right now to get them synchronized. This should take care of that (if it works as advertised).
- Messages – this is a no brainer, I used it a little bit today, and it worked fine. The phone carriers are not going to be happy about this, and Blackberry, who until recently had the best messaging system available, just blew the chance to do something like this, plus adding PC’s, which this presumably won’t do.
- Reminders and Notes – I don’t use them, but again, if the synchronization between devices works well, it will be a hit. You type your grocery list on your Mac, and it syncs with your iPhone, you set a reminder on your Mac before leaving home or work, and there it is, magical.
- Notification Center – Windows has had notifications for a long time, they are annoying and they suck. Growl has been doing a good job so far, but this takes it to the next level.
- Twitter integration – very nice, but Facebook should be there too. Too bad they don’t seem to get along that well.
- Airplay Mirroring – now this is one that has me very excited. Right now at my office, whenever we are going to do a presentation, there are cables to connect to the screen and it gets messy. This just solves it, no more cables, be it a presentation or a webinar.
- Gatekeeper – this is a nice feature, specially for people new to Mac, or who don’t want to mess with security, antivirus, etc. And is nice of Apple to offer three settings, from very restrictive to wild west.
This is just my impression from all I’ve seen and read today, I don’t have a developer’s preview, I’m just a regular Joe like everyone else. The hands on will have to wait until summer.
