Apple Announces Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

Apple has announced Mac OS X 10.8, aka Mac OS X Mountain Lion today, or rather the developer preview of Mac OS X Mountain Lion, which is the ninth major release of Mac OS X (don’t forget Mac OS X 10.0! – I know we try to forget Mac OS X 10.0, but that was a long time ago). It brings in several features from its mobile iOS platform, including Messages (covered here), Notes, Reminders, Game Center, Notification Center, Share Sheets, Twitter integration and AirPlay mirroring. Mountain Lion also introduces Gatekeeper, which controls/helps secure your Mac. Gatekeeper provides “complete control over what apps are installed on your Mac“.

It’s being built with a focus on making iCloud integration easy to use and easy for developers to integrate with Mac OS X applications, allowing for easy access to your data between applications, as well as an online backup.

There is a lot going on with Mountain Lion, and I’ll be talking more about it as I take a look at the developer preview.

For now, I’m interested to see how well the iCloud integration is, and whether Mac genealogy software developers are able to better use it to provide an easy way to sync and share genealogy information between Mac OS X genealogy applications and genealogy apps on iOS devices. Apple is already doing things that benefits genealogists – easy backups with Time Capsule and iCloud, and pushing the idea of making your data available anywhere, without a lot of effort on your part. A lot of us have probably experienced the issue of losing data due to a computer crash in the past or just not being able to have easy access to our data/information away from our “main” computer or Mac.

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Mac OS X 10.6.x Snow Leopard Users – Beware of Update

If you are a Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard user and applied Apple’s update last week, Security Update 2012-001, and you are running applications under Rosetta that were written for the PowerPC architecture that used to power Apple’s laptops and desktops, you may have problems with those applications. Mac … Read more

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 Released

Apple has released Mac OS X 10.7.3. You can update through the normal Software Update function of Mac OS X, or manually through the link below. Apple’s Safari 5.1.3 is also included in the update. At this time Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard does not include Apple Safari 5.1.3 … Read more

Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 Released

Apple has released Mac OS X 10.7.1 (Lion) for both clients and servers, and as usual, it comes with improvements in stability and compatibility and is recommended by Apple. Mac OS X 10.7.1 Changes * Address an issue that may cause the system to become unresponsive when playing a video … Read more

Original Apple Macintosh launched on this day in 1984

Today, January 24, 2011 marks a birthday of sorts, and we genealogists are fond of birthdays. It’s the birthday of the original Apple Macintosh, the Mactinosh 128K. It launched on January 24, 1984. As Wikipedia points out, this marked the first successful launch of a personal computer with a graphical … Read more

Apple Event – Tuesday, November 16, 2010

This is currently the front page of Apple.com Speculation is either Apple will have their North Carolina data center online and will be announcing some kind of cloud service where you can access the content you buy through iTunes through any device or the web easily, or more likely the … Read more