Apple Announces Mac OS X 10.8 ‘Mountain Lion’

Apple has today announced the next version of its Mac OS X operating system, “Mountain Lion”. This marks the ninth major release in the series, and is due out in late summer 2012. Those who have developer accounts with Apple can download the preview today, and get a jump on porting their software to it. There’s a fair bit new here, so let’s jump right to it.

A general theme that you can expect with 10.8 is iCloud support, as Apple touts the release as being the first to truly take advantage of the service from the ground up. Other applications such as Messages will take full advantage of iCloud, so if you make a change to a contact on your computer, it will be synced to the rest of your Apple and iOS devices as well. The same scheme applies to Reminders and Notes.

Messages is the full-on replacement for iChat, retaining support for AIM, Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. Those who currently use Lion are able to download a beta version of the program here, although the final version is going to be restricted to Mountain Lion.

Notification Center has also seen an overhaul, supporting alerts from things like Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, system updates and thankfully, third-party apps. Along with this, (and believe it or not), Twitter integration has been unveiled also here, allowing you to tweet directly from certain Apple-developed applications.

For gamers, an interesting addition is “Game Center”, a one-stop-shop for finding and purchasing games, and also hooking up with friends for a little multi-player action. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an available screenshot of the actual application, so it might be something that Apple is trying to keep keep quiet for now.

Gatekeeper is another addition that aims to lock-down what can be installed in order to keep your machine secure. You’ll have the option to install applications as always, or restrict it so that applications can only be downloaded from the Mac App Store or from those with unique developer IDs, or go all the way and allow only applications from the Mac App Store to be downloaded. For a lot of users, that last option might be a good one.

There’s more that can be talked about, but all of the above is the most major. To learn more, hit the link.