OS X 10.8 announced!

Woah, didn't see this coming. 10.8 Mountain Lion will be out in the summer!

Details: http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/16/2801047/mac-os-x-10-8-mountain-lion-preview-photos-video

Highlights: Notification Center, AirPlay mirroring, iMessage, Game Center, Twitter integration, further changes to iCloud including ability to store and access documents directly, Gatekeeper service allowing trusted developers to sign an app and distribute outside of the app store.

One More Thing: OS X Updates yearly from now on!

Update: Official announcement up on Apple's site: http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/

The new beta version of the Mountain Lion messages app is available for download if you have 10.7.3: http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/messages-beta/

Just for giggles here's a list of articles from around t'interweb that I've found so far:

http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion
http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/16/apple-os-x-mountain-lion-10-8-in-depth-preview/
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/16/apple-previews-mountain-lion-next-version-of-mac-os-x/
http://www.macworld.com/article/165407/2012/02/hands_on_with_apples_new_os_x_mountain_lion.html

This is real folks, it's far enough along to give to the tech sites to do in-depth previews and developer previews go live today. Summer (albeit probably late summer) seems very achievable based on what's out there so far.

maflynn said:

If that article is to be believed, its a pre-developer build. There's no way this will be out by summer when its not even at beta stage.

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Developer build out TODAY, this was a preview of that build to tech sites to allow articles to be put together. No reason for it not to be out in the summer frankly, most of the changes seem to be at the application level rather than the core OS and if Apple can itterate iOS on a yearly cycle why not OS X as well? It'll be late summer I suspect, maybe with a slip to autumn if something nasty is found but I really don't see a practical reason why this can't happen.

shenfrey said:

I'm going with a big fat FAKE

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Ahem: http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/

rorschach said:

Very happy to see Notification Center and iMessage coming to OS X. Not that those were too unexpected.

And it looks like iMessage is REPLACING iChat.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/features.html#messages



Finally.

Click to expand...

And is available... right now! http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/messages-beta/

Beta only granted but why not? My Macbook Air has some updating to do... after a quick time machine backup of course