According
to Wikipedia, the mountain lion, also known as the cougar, is
distinguished by having the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial
animal in the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, from what we've seen so far
of Apple's forthcoming Mac operating system, its new features will likely find favor with a broader range of Apple users than Lion.
Not everyone will embrace Mountain Lion's additions.
Unquestionably,
Apple has a vested interest in easing the path to the Mac from the iPad
and iPhone, whose users have expanded to include many people accustomed
to Windows PCs. Lion, the seventh major version of OS X, began the
post-iPad cycle of bringing iOS conventions "back to the Mac" --
revisions that fundamentally affected Mac's core user experience. A few
of these, including "natural" scrolling, full-screen apps and
particularly Launchpad, rankled some Mac veterans, who needed to either
unlearn old behaviors or just ignored them outright. In contrast, most
of Mountain Lion's additions focus on carrying over iOS applications and
features that feel more at home on the desktop.
However, not
everyone will embrace Mountain Lion's additions. Some of the new
features compete with those provided by third parties, although some at
least work with a broader array of platforms. The new features and the
apps that they encroach upon, if any at all, look like this:
AirPlay mirroring
With
the exception of anyone still rooting for Apple to hop on the DLNA
bandwagon, few will be displeased with this carry-over from the iPhone
and iPad, which lets you wirelessly send your display to a television
equipped with Apple TV. An alternative to Intel's WiDi technology built
into many Windows notebooks, this should come in handy for viewing
photos, watching movies and sharing presentations in the office, or even
the classroom.
Documents in the cloud
No
self-respecting company with its own ecosystem can move forward without a
cloud strategy these days. Apple seems to have broken free from the
ghost of MobileMe and .Mac, as evidenced by the 100 million users it's
attracted to iCloud. The integration with Mountain Lion will step up
competition with a number of cloud storage services, particularly
startup darling Dropbox. But Dropbox has been especially aggressive in
supporting a broad range of platforms. Even on the app-poor BlackBerry
PlayBook, for example, where Dropbox does not have a branded client,
third parties have created apps to access your Dropbox folder.
Messages
Apple seems to have broken free from the ghost of MobileMe.
Showing
that RIM won't be the only company to make a go of a private messaging
service on handsets, Apple has claimed strong adoption of iMessage, with
100 million users sending 26 billion messages since its launch
last summer. Those users will now be able to include Macs in their
secure multimedia chit-chat using Messages, which represents the other
shoe dropping on FaceTime / iChat. Despite FaceTime taking over video
chat duties for Messages, multiparty chat will continue to be supported
in Mountain Lion.
Notes
Much as Documents in the Cloud
competes with the more ubiquitous Dropbox, Notes – which syncs with the
iOS app of the same name – competes with Web-app hybrids such as
Springpad, Catch and, in particular, Evernote. Just like Documents in
the Cloud, though, Notes will be limited to OS X and iOS, whereas those
competing apps are available on more platforms, and in the browser.
Game Center
As
iOS game owners well know, Apple's Game Center is one of two main
options available for services such as leaderboards, achievements and
matchmaking, the other being OpenFeint. The arrival of Game Center on
the Mac resurrects the old challenges that XBox Live created when it
expanded from its namesake console to the PC, where players had an
advantage in certain kinds of games due to the more expansive controls
available on that platform. Things may be a bit more evenly matched on
Apple's platforms, though, where the multitouch screen could lend the
iPad some advantages in casual gaming.
Notifications
While
notifications have long since been standard in Windows, Mac users have
primarily relied on a third-party utility called Growl for their ambient
pop-ups. Mountain Lion's approach is kind of a mashup between Growl-
and iOS-style notifications, with a two-finger trackpad gesture allowing
you to swipe from the right to open notifications. Suffice to say,
OS-level support for notifications should lead to broader adoption.
