OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
The OS X and iOS announcements seemed to have the over arching theme that all your devices are screens, no matter which one you happen to be in front of, all the same information will be present. If this works the way it should, I will happily drink all the Kool-Aid in the bowl. The backbone of all of this shared/synced information is iCloud, the vastly underwhelming cloud platform Apple unveiled last year. Applications that will be taking advance of iCloud include: Reminders, Notes, Messages, Notification Center, Game Center, Documents in the Cloud and Safari. Most of these are direct cross-over from iOS, so you are already familiar with themassuming you are one of the gazillion billion people with an iPhone, iPad and/or iPod Touch. Yet, one really cool addition that is worthy of mentioning is Game Center Everywhere. Game Center Everywhere allows players to go head to head on their iPad, iPhones, iPod touch or Mac. LAN Party! (
CYA Disclosure: Dont expect to get a bunch of your buddies to come over and play WoW through Game Center Everywhere. Obviously the games have to be written to work in Game Center Everywhere, and games are a bit thin on the Mac, so it might be a bit of a ghost town at first.) What syncing capabilities iCloud supposedly supports has been spotty, at best, so it will be interesting to see how the servers will handle the new load. One of the most disappointing lack of features in iCloud to date was Documents in the Cloud working between iOS and Mac OS X. This is why many users have continued using Dropbox as it is one of the most reliable ways to keep documents synced across all devices, even if it is convoluted. This is the feature I am most anticipating. Fingers crossed it will work as demoed. Some features that are not directly linked to iCloud are: Power Nap, Dictation, Sharing and Air Play. Power Nap allows your computer to update Mail, Contacts, Reminders, etc. while sleeping. Dictation works just like iOS 5 on iPad. Where ever you can type you can now dictate. With Sharing Apple is striving to better embrace social networking. With a few clicks you can now share what you are reading, watching, listening to, via Mail Messages, Air Drop or send it straight to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo. Thats right: Facebook. Like Twitter in iOS, Facebook is now going to be integrated with Mac OS X. The Facebook integration will allow syncing of contacts as well as the ability to post straight from Notification Center. Finally, Air Play, will allow you to send videos or music straight from your Mac to AppleTV or AirPlay-enabled speakers. Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is scheduled for release sometime in July. Click "next" to read part 3 below;