OS X Mountain Lion: Quick, Familiar, Cheap, And Drenched In iOS Goodness

MG Seigler from TechCrunch gives us the low down on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion..

Mg Siegler

Trying to write a review of OS X Mountain Lion is tricky. First of all, I had already written a review back in February, when Apple legitimately surprised the world with the revelation that the ninth iteration of OS X was just about ready to go. Granted, back then I only had a few days to play with an early build. But it was already pretty solid at that point. Now, months later, I’ve had a lot of time to play with Mountain Lion, and I’m happy to report that it’s even more solid.

But ending my review there wouldn’t do Mountain Lion the justice it deserves. It’s definitely the most polished and robust version of OS X yet. If you liked Lion, you’ll love Mountain Lion. If you didn’t like Lion, you’ll probably love Mountain Lion even more because it seems to fix a lot of the performance/quirkiness issues that some folks were having with the last version of OS X.

I didn’t have any of those issues with Lion, so as someone who had started using an iOS device far more than a Mac, I liked Lion right from the start because it borrowed a lot of little ideas from iOS. And Mountain Lion expands upon that practice. So, unsurprisingly, I like it even more.

It must be said that Mountain Lion isn’t really all that different from Lion — hence, the variation of the name (even though mountain lions are technically cougars — insert joke here). But unlike the jump from Leopard to Snow Leopard, which focused on performance and tightening code rather than features, the jump from Lion to Mountain Lion does pack some new goodies.

Apple has already highlighted what they view to be the 10 key features of Mountain Lion, both in the original previews and at WWDC last month. I won’t spend time giving an overview of each of them again — if you’d like that, go here.

Instead, I thought I’d talk a bit about my experience using Mountain Lion over these past several months. And point out the things I like the best, and a few things that I don’t like.

Initially, I just had Mountain Lion installed on the review machine that Apple loaned me back in February. But as Mountain Lion quickly became more stable, I decided to install a developer build on one of my personal Macs as well. On a mid-2011 MacBook Air, there were no noticeable performance gains (nor is Apple touting any), but the machine did seem to wake up much quicker from sleep. More recently, when I installed Mountain Lion on my 2009 iMac, I did notice that my machine started up (and shut down) significantly faster, which was nice. Overall, that older machine has had no issues with Mountain Lion (though there are limits as to just how old a machine can be and still run the new OS).

App compatibility has been surprisingly good. I actually haven’t found any with major problems due to the upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion. I’m sure there are some out there, but even apps that pushed out Mountain Lion-ready updates a little early seemed to work fine without the updates (the updates just added things such as Notification Center capabilities).

Notifications are the most in-your-face and probably best new feature of Mountain Lion. We’re all used to dozens of apps on our machines alerting us to something. Now the process is streamlined in a very iOS-like manner. While there aren’t too many third-party apps out there that support these new notifications yet, Apple’s built-in apps alone make this a most-welcome addition.

Those built-in apps now include Twitter in Mountain Lion. If you sign in (from the settings) with your Twitter account, you can now get notifications every time someone @replies you or DMs you. It’s fantastic. And while there is a button that enables you to tweet right from the notification area on the right side of the screen, when you reply to Twitter notifications, unfortunately you’re dumped into the web app (who knows what Twitter is doing with Twitter for Mac, which still has the old Twitter logo and non-Retina graphics).

Also built-in will be Facebook. Oddly though, this feature won’t go live until the fall (with an update to Mountain Lion). Apple gave me a build with Facebook enabled, and it seems to work well. You can post with the click of a button just as you can with Twitter — and it works with Facebook’s more granular sharing settings (share with just your family group, for example). I assume Apple wants to give developers a little more time to work with this Facebook integration, as many of them will want to use it for things like Single Sign On for apps, and sharing.

The fact that Chrome and Safari work with Notification Center is great news for web apps. I’ve been able to get alerts when I have a new Gmail message, for example. Chrome has had a similar banner system for some time, but the native OS X notification experience easily blows it away.

Another feature that users are likely to notice pretty quickly is Gatekeeper. That’s a bit odd since it’s not really meant to be a forward-facing feature, but rather it’s meant to be more of a protection layer. But since the default setting is to block unsigned apps from the web, people are likely to hit it right away (since most developers won’t be properly signed at the launch of the OS). Don’t panic. This doesn’t mean you can’t install all of your favorite apps via the web with Mountain Lion, it just means that you’ll have to go into settings and hit a button to allow for unsigned app installs.

I suspect we’ll see a little backlash against this early on simply because there won’t be a lot of developers signed up just yet. (And I can’t wait to watch parents try to figure out how to change the default settings.) I’m told some bigger ones, like Adobe, are already on board. But there are thousands upon thousands of developers out there that will want to get the certification (which only requires a $99/year developer account — there’s no vetting at first, it’s an honor system until you do something wrong). It may take a little time.

Another new feature that I’ve run into time and time again in Mountain Lion is Documents in the Cloud. Because iCloud is now fully baked into the OS, you’ll find this feature as a part of everything from TextEdit to Preview. This also may be a bit jarring at first because it’s really blowing up the traditional notion of a file system, at least from a conceptual perspective. Rather than files residing in folders on some drive that you access through Finder, files are now simply documents within the apps themselves.

That probably sounds more confusing that it is. It actually makes a lot more sense to do things this way — and again, it’s something borrowed from iOS. When you open a document-based app in Mountain Lion, you’ll be asked to pick which document you wish to open from a list of documents specifically tied to that app. If you want to open an outside document, you still can, but it’s a step away now into the folder system.

Then there are the apps that have been ported over from iOS: Reminders, Notes, and Messages. Each is great provided you’re also an iOS (and by extension, iCloud) user, otherwise they may seem weak. Messages was released in beta form late last year as a replacement for iChat. It’s probably good that Apple did this because it was very wonky at first. In Mountain Lion, it seems much more stable. More importantly, messages delivery seems to actually work all the time now no matter which device you’re using.

But for people who were used to iChat, with its more traditional IM ways, Messages will probably seem a bit odd. Even now, the iMessage/IM duality is sort of strange — am I supposed to close/delete messages after I’m done with “chat session”?

Another killer new feature of Mountain Lion that I find myself using quite a bit is AirPlay. iOS users will know this well, and they should be thrilled to have this for the Mac now. A couple weeks ago, there was a sporting event that was being streamed live on the web, but wasn’t available on the iPhone/iPad. With Mountain Lion, I simply opened a browser window, hit one button, and my entire desktop was sent to my TV via my Apple TV. I put the video fullscreen and you couldn’t even tell we were routing this, wirelessly, through a computer. Magic.

One feature I’m still not completely sold on yet is Safari. Apple’s web browser has been around for years now, and each year, Apple seems to claim it’s the fastest out there. The problem is that there are so many tests now tailored to different things, that it’s hard to know what matters. All I know is that in daily usage, Chrome still feels faster to me, so that’s what I use.

But Apple has once again overhauled Safari to make it competitive with Mountain Lion. A couple key features rely on iCloud: iCloud Tabs and Reading List. It’s definitely nice to see what tabs you have open on other Apple devices, but Reading List feels less compelling in a world of Instapaper and Pocket.

The biggest change you’ll find in Safari is the addition of a “Smart Search” bar — or an “omnibar”, to use Google’s parlance. That is, a unified top text bar that smartly handles both URLs and searches. Chrome has had this feature for a while, and it’s a welcome addition to Safari (though, oddly, it’s not a part of Mobile Safari).

Also new is the Safari Tab View. This allows you to zoom out of any page and get a quick look at the tabs you currently have open. It’s a nice effect, but it’s simply not that practical. I’d much rather see Safari add something like pinned tabs, to make the tab situation more manageable.

While I said that performance gains weren’t a concentrated focus for Mountain Lion, one area the OS X team did work on is smooth scrolling and hardware acceleration within Safari. The work shows.

Overall, Mountain Lion feels like the most natural step yet towards the convergence of iOS and OS X. While Apple says there are now over 66 million OS X users, Apple sold nearly 50 million iOS devices just last quarter. It’s clear that OS X has to continue to creep closer to iOS simply because that’s what far more people know now.

It’s hard to imagine how Apple will further refine OS X from here. Maybe they don’t — maybe OS XI (OS 11?) is next. Or maybe Apple has one more big cat left in the bag (in terms of nicknames, there really only are a couple left). For now, Mountain Lion will stand atop the mountain. It’s solid, polished, and perhaps most importantly, cheap.

For $19.99 in the Mac App Store, you’ll be able to upgrade all your machines to Mountain Lion. You can upgrade both Lion machines and Snow Leopard machines, and they both cost the same price, which is great. If your machine is compatible, the upgrade is an absolute no-brainer.

In a time when Microsoft is just about to upend their entire OS with their biggest change (and bet) yet in Windows 8, Apple has taken a much more refined approach. Perhaps they take some criticism for this, or perhaps they’re just being savvy. OS X remains a great OS. And sprinkled with some of the best elements of iOS, it still feels pretty fresh. Not bad for an eleven-year-old big cat.

You can find OS X Mountain Lion in the Mac App Store here.

Don't upgrade to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion before reading this

Summary: It's tempting to install OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" immediately, but to avoid a costly mistake you need to thoroughly check all of your productivity apps to make sure that they're compatible. 

By Jason D. O'Grady for The Apple Core | July 26, 2012 -- 03:39 GMT (04:39 BST)

Apple released OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" ($19.99, Mac App Store) today and we Mac users tend to be quicker than most to update our software. This blog post is a cautionary tale that you should heed if you use your Mac to earn a living or if your rely on it to be productive.
First, it's important to note that 10.8 is a major update of the entire operating system. It's much different than an incremental update to an application or even an incremental update to the OS (like 10.7.4 was). If you use your Mac to make a living or perform live, you should wait until the dust settles before installing an update of the magnitude of Mountain Lion.
You've gone this far without it, so another couple of days or a week won't kill you. Or as the old expression goes "pioneers take the arrows, settlers take the land."
The problem with major OS updates like 10.8 is that they break things. And nothing's worse than installing a major update like 10.8 only to find out that one of the apps that you use daily now crashes on launch, or won't connect to the Internet. Or that your data is gone or corrupted.
Another thing to consider is that 10.8 was relased to the public just 16 days after being declared "Golden Master." This means that developers have only been testing their applications against 10.8 for just over two weeks -- assuming that they downloaded the GM on the first day it was available and that they've been testing every day since.

I recommend waiting at least a week before installing 10.8 on your production machine. Use this time to read the Apple blogs (*cough*), and the forums of the software developers that you use the most to see if issues have arisen with 10.8 that you should know about. Apple's own Mountain Lion support overview and discussion boards are a great place to start. Just search for your most critical applications and contribute to the threads.
Another site I recommend is RoaringApps.com which aggregates 10.8 compatibility reports on hundreds of applications. It's not the fastest site in the world, but it can save you a lot of heartache. Check your top applications on Roaring Apps to make sure that they're compatible before taking the leap.
Once you've waited the requisite week and done your homework, make a complete bootable backup of your hard drive before pulling the trigger on 10.8. And don't be lazy. In fact skip Time Machine completely and invest in a solid backup application like SuperDuper! ($28) or Carbon Copy Cloner ($30) and clone your entire hard drive or SSD to an external. Then boot from the backup and make sure that the backup is 100 percent operational.
If you're an early adopter and have already installed Apple's latest kitty, take the time to report incompatible apps through the above means (RoaringApps.com, Developer fourms, Apple Communities) and save others a lot of grief.

Google borrows Microsoft tactics as it ramps up Amazon cloud battle

Summary: Google and Microsoft's cloud revamps look set to dramatically change the competitive marketplace for infrastructure-as-a-service, but people are sceptical of their ability to dethrone Amazon

By Jack Clark for Cloud Watch | July 26, 2012 -- 13:40 GMT (14:40 BST)

 

Google was once a revolutionary company, but its revamped cloud offering, Google Compute Engine, shows it has fallen prey to the same type of proprietary thinking that has afflicted Microsoft in its fight to take on Amazon.

Both Google and Microsoft began their clouds with platform-as-a-service systems - closed technologies that forced developers to write their applications in a small set of languages, with little ability to control the underlying infrastructure.

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This was a blunder for both companies as, contrary to the wisdom of the time, it was the low-end infrastructure-as-a-service model that came to take the lion's share of cloud spending.

Now, Google and Microsoft have re-jigged their clouds to better fit that model, but having spent four years working on technologies in the wrong area of the market, cloud integrators and competitors are sceptical of Google and Microsoft's ability to convince customers that their clouds are better than Amazon's.

"For them to focus on [IaaS] says to me that those behemoths, those organisations are going where the money is in the initial adoption which is in the IaaS layer," Robin Meehan, chief technology officer of cloud consultancy of Smart421, says. But "Amazon win both ways... they have a market-leading infrastructure-as-a-service offering".

Of the two, Azure is a more capable competitor, but only since it was re-engineered to include an infrastructure-as-a-service capability, according to Kevin Reid, chief technology officer of Virtustream, an enterprise-focused cloud company.

"It's very difficult to think of [Azure] as a pure deployment engine when you don't have an IaaS that goes side-by-side with it," he says. "A lot of legacy applications have a lot of interdependencies... where Microsoft had to change their tune was in realising those dependencies they had to... take care of."

And, given both Google and Microsoft have PaaS services that they have poured significant R&D into, they have an interest in making sure their technology encourages users to climb up the stack, when they are ready. This contrasts with Amazon's approach, which has been, as chief technology officer Werner Vogels puts it, to encourage services like Heroku and EngineYard to live on top of its cloud to "let a thousand platforms bloom".

Proprietary attitudes

Google's attempt to take on Amazon in IaaS could also be hobbled by its commitment to proprietary technology, and its secrecy around it: as the company's cloud sits on the same technology used to power the rest of its services, the company has been loath to disclose the precise technical details of its architecture.

"Google have wrapped it all up in a completely managed thing," James Monico, technical director of consultancy Cloudreach, says. "Amazon have gone infrastructure plus open source."

It's a similar story for Microsoft, meaning both companies may not be able to share as much information with developers about their clouds as Amazon can, given Google has an interest in protecting the technologies that power its mainstay web advertising business.

On a side note, the most noticeable effect of Microsoft and Google's entrance will probably be further price reductions by Amazon, according to Meehan, who expects the three companies to "slug it out for quite a while at very low [profit] margins to do a landgrab", and, after this has played out, they will ultimately differentiate themselves through SLAs pegged to availability.

All in all, the picture that emerges from Google and Microsoft's moves is of two rich businesses that have been caught on the backfoot by a scrappy young start-up. In this cloudy world, Microsoft has become IBM, Google has become Microsoft and Amazon has become the new Google. The way this triumvirate competes will have a huge impact on the industry.

Update Java or Kill it

Microsoft: Update Java or kill it

Summary: Microsoft is offering advice on how to protect yourself from Java-based malware. The instructions are simple: either update it, disable it, or just uninstall it completely.

By Emil Protalinski for Zero Day | July 26, 2012 -- 15:06 GMT (16:06 BST)

 

Microsoft has decided is enough is enough: Java-based malware sees no end and it's time to do something about it. The software giant points to two type-confusion vulnerabilities (CVE-2012-0507 and CVE-2012-1723) that have been very actively exploited in recent months. Redmond thus wants you to do one of three things: update Java, disable it, or uninstall it.

First, some background. Type-confusion vulnerabilities are effective because they lead to a Sandbox compromise for Java. They occur when the type safety check in Java Runtime Environment (JRE) fails to verify wrong types supplied to instructions working with different types. If the classes' type safety is broken, you can access some methods that are not supposed to be opened to processes outside of the class.

As a result, Microsoft's first recommendation is to update your Java installation. To check the version of JRE your browser is running, head over to java.com/en/download/installed.jsp and get the latest version.

I did that in Chrome and IE9. Google's browser informed me that "Java(TM) is required to display some elements on this page." Excellent, so I don't have Java installed in Chrome, which I use the most frequently. Next, Microsoft's browser gave me the following error:

No working Java was detected on your system.
Install Java by clicking the button below.

I know I have Java installed, but I'm guessing this error is happening because it's the 64-bit version. I wasn't suprised Oracle still hasn't fixed Sun's version check code.

Next up, Microsoft has offered guidance for those who don't want to keep Java updated. The software giant points to Apple's instructions for the Mac (support.apple.com/kb/HT5241) and details its own instructions for Windows:

If you prefer, you may also just disable your current Java Plug-in temporarily to prevent being vulnerable to Java-based threats. To do this, on Windows systems, go to "Control Panel" and select "Java". When the "Java Runtime Environment Settings" dialog box appears, select the "Java" tab. From there, click the "View" button. You can just uncheck the "Enabled" check box to disable that installation from being used by Java Plug-in and Java Web Start. Even though you can disable Java Plug-in on a per-browser basis, this method is most effective in disabling Java Plug-in system-wise.

Last but not least, Microsoft recommended you uninstall Java if you don't use it. Instructions from Oracle are available at java.com/en/download/uninstall.jsp.

After seeing Microsoft's warning, I chose to kill Java with fire. I removed it completely from my Windows 7 box. Mind you, I'll probably be doing some programming in a few months, but I'll just reinstall Java then.

"So, by following some simple steps, you can protect your machine from this malware infection by choosing to update, disable or uninstall," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "All of these will be effective for preventing currently prevalent Java based malware; it's just up to you to choose the right method to protect yourself based on your needs and situation."

Tizen | An open source, standards-based software platform for multiple device categories.

Tizen | An open source, standards-based software platform for multiple device categories.:

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Life After Steve Jobs..

When does Apple's Tim Cook era really begin?

Larry Dignan of ZDNet and SmartPlanet tells us more..

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/when-does-apples-tim-cook-era-really-begin/56149?tag=nl.e539