through… a press release. A handful of top tech blogs have had their hands on a preview version for the last week, and now Apple has announced that the Developer Preview is available to members of the Mac Developer Program. There’s no keynote, no boom!, and certainly no one-last-thing.It is very, very odd for tech sites to get their hands on a new operating system before developers. Usually this is only done when a company expects backlash from developers, and so it tries to preempt bad publicity by handing an almost-exclusive story to googly-eyed reviewers.
But what exactly is Apple concerned about, when it comes to Mountain Lion? If you read PC Mag’s review, you’ll note that almost every new feature has been yanked out of iOS. Notification Center, AirPlay mirroring, and Game Center are all billed as major new features in Mountain Lion — and they’re all exactly the same as their iOS equivalents. If that wasn’t enough, Apple has renamed iChat, iCal, and Address Book to match their iPad doppelgangers; they’re now called Messages, Calendar, and Contacts. Reminders and Notes are now standalone, iCloud-enabled apps — and yes, iCloud integration is now a lot deeper; you can save documents directly to iCloud from the File menu. Finally, “share” buttons with Twitter integration can now be found throughout OS X. So far, so good.
As far as new-new features, though, there’s only one: Gatekeeper. Gatekeeper, by default, only allows your Mac to run apps from the Mac App Store, or apps that have been signed by the developer. It will apparently be quite easy to sign an app — Apple insists that the process will be quick and easy — but as yet there’s no confirmation on whether developers will be vetted/moderated/reviewed by Apple. The idea is that, out of the box, Gatekeeper will prevent malware from being executed — the caveat, of course, is that developers have from now until Mountain Lion’s launch in the summer to get their apps signed, or face being ostracized. Then there’s the aforementioned Notification Center: Only apps that come from the Mac App Store will be allowed to use it. Deeper iCloud integration, too, will only be available to Mac App Store apps. This, plus Gatekeeper, are probably the features that Apple expects developer backlash from.
As far as consumers are concerned, though, Mountain Lion looks absolutely awesome. The Verge has a video of AirPlay mirroring in action — watch it, it’s amazing. With Messages, you can now seamlessly chat to any other Mac or iOS device. With Game Center, you can network up a Mac and an iPhone or iPad for competitive gaming. With Mountain Lion, Apple has almost turned its PCs into an all-in-one consumer home entertainment system.
It a genius move: Apple is giving consumers exactly what they want. It would be a foolhardy developer that complains in the face such zealous adversity.
Read more at Apple
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