OS X Mountain Lion Review: What is the newest Mac OS upto?

Within 7 months after its previous release (OSX Lion), Apple has launched yet another release of the operating system for its Mac platform – OS X Mountain Lion. In an indication of how fast Google and Apple are compared to Microsoft, Apple has launched 8 versions of the OSX in the time Microsoft took to launch 2. It looks like Apple wanted to steal Microsoft’s thunder – a lot of the new features are direct competitors to the proposed features in Windows 8. Microsoft will be launching its public beta in 2 weeks, and Apple seems to have timed this release for that. Also Apple has taken plenty of popular features from the iOs and moved it to Mac. In this review of OS X we will cover the major features in the Mac OS.

OS X Mountain Lion – Major features

1. Tight integration of Apple’s cloud storage app – iCloud with the OS. This is similar to what Windows 8 is doing with Microsoft Skydrive. Now, you can save and sync any file in your OS with the cloud in a pretty easy way.
2. Related to the previous point, Mac’s competitor to Microsoft Office – iWork allows you to automatically sync with documents in the cloud.
3. Gatekeeper application – this is a new security feature that monitors the apps you are trying to install. As Mac’s user base gets wider it is now getting attacked by malware that previously only Windows users were exposed to. The Gatekeeper prompts you if you are trying to install from any developer that is not recognized by Apple.
4. Airplay feature – This is a popular feature on iOS that lets you instantly mirror content from iPhone to Apple TV and other devices. Now, this experience comes to desktop world too.
5. Message – The iMessage launched in iOS last year proved to be a super-hit. Over 100 million users have signed up, sending billions of messages. Now, Apple has brought the messaging experience in the desktop that replaces the existing chat client.
6. Notifications Center – Apple has now produced an unified notifications center for you manage the alerts from emails, chat etc. You will now see the alerts on the right that disappear in 10 seconds.
7. Gamecenter – Games are the most used applications in the iOS and Apple is bringing the gaming experience to Mac too. With the game center, you can now play in your Mac, many of the games that you could only play in your iPhone or iPad.
8. Reminder tool – now you won’t forget your appointments easily. Besides the Calendar application Mac allows the inbuilt reminder tool to keep you better organized.
9. Deep Twitter integration. Now you can Tweet from any screen in as easy as 2 clicks.
10. Omnibox in Safari like what Chrome has. This lets you search/type URL in the same box.

On the whole the OS X Mountain Lion seems to be an interesting edition and will help Apple make further inroads into Microsoft’s PC user base. I will look forward to buying it when it hits the stores.