Apple on Monday announced plans to ship the next version of OS X, “Mountain Lion,” in July for $20. It’s also going to be available as a free update for Apple’s newly-shipping MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops.
Many features of Mountain Lion have been previously announced – 200 new features are coming to the next release of OS X. Apple used this morning’s WWDC keynote address to developers in San Francisco to highlight several of the new features.
iCloud, Apple’s cloud services replacement for its subscription-based “MobileMe” service, now has 125 million users. iCloud is being integrated directly into Mountain Lion. Apple has introduced a new Software Development Kit (SDK) that it’s promoting to third party developers to enable a “Documents In the Cloud” function that enable apps to access documents from iCloud. Apple has integrated this feature in new updates to many of its own applications, including Pages, Numbers and Keynote (its “iWork” suite); TextEdit and Preview.
Notification Center is coming to Mountain Lion; the feature enables you to easily recognize events in different applications with a pop-up window. Up to now, such functionality has been relegated to third-party applications like Growl.
Dictation functionality is also coming to the OS. This functionality started with the iPhone 4S and trickled to the new iPad – now it’s coming to the Mac. It’s short of a full Siri implementation, but it’s a start. Everywhere on the Mac that you can type, you can dictate, according to Apple SVP Phil Schiller.
Safari now has the “fastest JavaScript engine on the planet,” and can look at histories of any of your Apple devices. It sports a new scrolling architecture built around OS X’s Core Animation architecture, and includes a new “Tab View” similar to Safari on iOS.
A new technology called Power Nap helps keep your Mac up to date while it sleeps. Power Nap lets your Mac back up, download App Store updates and system updates all while the Mac sleeps. It’s compatible with recent MacBook Air and new MacBook Pro models, to start.
AirPlay mirroring lets you send 1080p content to an Apple TV or audio to any AirPlay-enabled stereo system or speaker system.
Apple is also introducing Game Center support on OS X for the first time – multiplayer Mac-to-Mac support and cross-platform to iOS devices.
Apple is also improving Chinese support in OS X with new input methods, dictionaries, fonts and support for Chinese social networks.
More details are forthcoming.