Posts tagged with "Mountain Lion"

Mountain Lion Downloaded 3 Million Times In Four Days

Apple hast just announced over 3 million copies of OS X Mountain Lion were downloaded in four days of sale on the Mac App Store, translating to roughly $60 million in revenue on launch day. Apple says it has been the most successful release in the history of OS X.

Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

On the MAS, Mountain Lion has over 7000 ratings with over 5200 being five-star reviews. Apple has not made Mountain Lion available offline via a $69 USB key as they’ve done with Lion, so far sticking to the Mac App Store (or the purchase of a new Mac) as the only upgrade paths. Apple customers whom have purchased a new Mac between June 11th and July 25th are eligible for a free upgrade through Apple’s Up-to-Date program.

By comparison, OS X Lion exceeded 1 million downloads on its first day of sales (Lion was priced at $29.99); 76 days later, on October 4th, Apple announced 6 million copies of Lion had been downloaded.

Mountain Lion, available for $19.99, includes a wide assortment of new features, including AirPlay Mirroring, the Notification Center, Game Center, Messages, Power Nap for compatible Macs, and apps such as Notes and Reminders. You can read more about Mountain Lion’s new features in our comprehensive review.

Mountain Lion Links

In this post, we have collected some interesting links about Mountain Lion following its release last week. You should also check out our review, or buy our eBook.

Create Reminders using Alfred. Gianni Rondini has put together a nice Alfred extension that, by using AppleScript support in Reminders, adds new items with a very simple syntax. Obviously, the extension will launch Reminders.app if it’s not open, as the app needs to be running to receive AppleScript commands. Download it here.

Customize the dialog that asks for access to a user’s contacts. As pointed out by Daniel Jalkut, there’s an easy way for developers to customize the information displayed in the new dialog that asks for permission to access your contacts. Third-party apps that need to look-up your contacts even for mundane tasks like auto-fill can take advantage of this (otherwise, the dialog will be generic, with no additional details provided to the user).

 Michael Tsai’s Mountain Lion notes. Good collection of miscellaneous links and information here. I agree with Michael’s comments on the Safari address bar, but I still can’t stand how Google Search URLs aren’t copied to the clipboard (as I noted in my review, search terms are).

The story of the new Zebra wallpaper. Directly by photographer Steve Bloom.

Enable backspace navigation in Safari. Use this Terminal command to be able to navigate in history using the backspace key. I have my MacBook Air set to navigate using three-finger swipes, as well as backspace.

On Mountain Lion’s iCloud filesystem. iA’s Oliver Reichenstein takes a look at the structure of iCloud files and folders under Mountain Lion. Their text editing app, iA Writer, has recently implemented support for folders in the iCloud Document Library across Mac and iOS.

Ars Technica’s review of Mountain Lion Server. Good overview by Matt Cunningham.

Mountain Lion and the Simplification of OS X. Shawn Blanc explains why the interplay of iOS and OS X goes beyond mere graphical resemblances.

Virtual Hosts and Web Sharing in Mountain Lion. A guide on how to bring back a local hosting environment by Brett Terpstra.

Get Back “Save As…” menu. Yet another trick to get back “Save As..” in Mountain Lion.

Mountain Lion and AppleScript. Shane Stanley writes about some important changes of AppleScript in OS X 10.8 over at TidBITS.

For more Mountain Lion coverage, visit our hub.

Mountain Lion: Game Center

A key part of iOS gaming since it debuted with iOS 4, Game Center has finally come to OS X with Mountain Lion and effectively replicates the social gaming experience we have come to know and enjoy on our iOS devices. In Mountain Lion, players can now access their existing Game Center accounts through the new Game Center app, giving them complete access to all their achievements, leaderboards, friends, and statistics across all of Apple’s platforms. Read more

Aperture, iPhoto, and iMovie Receive Small Updates Alongside Launch of Mountain Lion

While Apple’s iWork updates for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers include support for iCloud and the MacBook Pro with Retina display, today’s updates for professional and creative applications such as Aperture (already updated to take advantage of the Retina display), iPhoto, and iMovie consist of stability improvements and further integration with this morning’s release of OS X Mountain Lion.

Aperture 3.3.2

The latest version of Aperture includes updates for added compatibility with Mountain Lion, addresses stability issues that can occur when the app is in Full Screen mode, tweaks auto white balance when using Skin Tone mode, and now lets users sort projects and albums in the Library Inspector by date, name, and kind.

iPhoto 9.3.2

Today’s iPhoto update is about bringing sharing options to Messages and Twitter, whilst fixing some stability issues and improving compatibility with Mountain Lion. Last month, iPhoto and Aperture were updated with the release of the MacBook Pro with Retina display. Among other things, this update unified the two apps’ libraries, enabling them to access each others’ stored photos natively.

iMovie 9.0.7

While iMovie’s release notes don’t specifically mention Mountain Lion on the Mac App Store, it does call for fixes with third-party Quicktime components, improved stability when viewing MPEG-2 clips in the Camera Import window, and brings sound back to MPEG-2 clips important from a camera (where it may have been absent before).

You can download Aperture, iPhoto, and iMovie from the Mac App Store.

Mountain Lion: Getting The Most Out Of Messages

If, like me, you ever wished for an easy way to send messages from your computer to a phone that wasn’t AIM, a flaky SMS workaround, or email, the announcement of iMessage coming to the Mac was something of a Jobsend. When iMessage was introduced in late 2011 along iOS 5 and brought support for text messaging without the fees or character limits to iOS, many people (myself included) immediately found themselves wishing they could use it on their Macs as well. With Mountain Lion, that wish has come true.

So what can you do with iMessage on your Mac now that it’s here? Read more

iWork Suite Updated With iCloud & Retina MacBook Pro Support

Apple has today updated the Mac versions of iWork (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) to include support for the new display on the Retina MacBook Pro as well as integration of iCloud. Support for iCloud now allows users of the iWork apps to create documents on their iPhone, iPad or Mac and then continue working on them on any of their other devices, no matter where they are. The highlight of it all is that changes are synced across automatically and instantly. iCloud support for the Mac apps has been a long time coming, with the iOS versions updated to include support late last year, but comes today on the release of Mountain Lion which touts iCloud support as one of the key improvements.

Users of the new Retina MacBook Pro and iWork suite will also be happy with today’s update that now natively supports the new display. As Apple says, “everything you create in iWork is stunning on the new MacBook Pro with Retina display”.

For those wanting a complete overhaul of the iWork suite, well today just isn’t that day. Whilst Apple nearly always just calls it “iWork”, there are a few reminders on Apple’s own website, that these are apps that last received a major update in 2009.

You can download or purchase the latest version of iWork from the Mac App Store: Pages, Keynote, Numbers.

Mountain Lion: Notification Center Explained


Notifications have been a part of iOS from day one, and last year’s iOS 5 update improved them greatly with Notification Center and the new banner style (the one that rolls down from the top of the screen without disrupting your current activity). They are an integral part of our interactions with our iPhones and iPads — we get them from missed calls, text messages, emails, reminders, social network interactions, apps, games, and so on. But on the Mac, notifications have been more of a hack than a system-level feature: something that developers have implemented themselves, and mostly just when they felt it was absolutely necessary to do so. As a result, they haven’t been nearly as much a part of the OS X experience as they have on iOS.

The most widely-used system for notifications on OS X until now has been Growl: a third-party app that allowed developers to easily implement their own notifications. It was widely adopted by the OS X developer community, and over the years it became an essential install for many Mac users. But Growl isn’t the best solution for notifications because it is still a third party app that the user must go out of their way to install.[1] Whilst this isn’t a problem for an experienced computer user, it is for those that don’t want or need to worry about finding a download link for a third-party notification solution or keeping it up to date (though admittedly this has become less of a problem with Growl’s release on the Mac App Store). And of course Apple itself would never use Growl for notifications for their own apps, some of which could benefit most from notifications (e.g. Mail, Messages, and FaceTime).

Fortunately, in OS X Mountain Lion Apple has now implemented native notifications and Notification Center. If you’ve ever used iOS 5 you’ll instantly be familiar with how they work because Apple has effectively recreated them for the Mac, only making a few changes to suit the different platform. All of Apple’s built-in OS X applications support the new notifications (Messages, Mail, Reminders, Mac App Store, FaceTime, etc) and there is an API for developers to add support for them to their own as well.

Read more

Apple Pulls Lion From The Mac App Store With The Release Of Mountain Lion

Apple today released OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on the Mac App Store and has now also removed OS X 10.7 Lion from the Mac App Store. You can no longer go to the Lion page via its direct link, by searching or by finding it on the top grossing list as it was earlier this morning.

Apple presumably pulled Lion because users wanting to upgrade to Mountain Lion can also do so from Snow Leopard. Keeping both Lion and Mountain Lion on the Mac App Store would have presumably caused confusion for some users - particularly given Lion cost $29.99 and Mountain Lion costs just $19.99 - seemingly suggesting that Lion was the latest OS.

Update 4:05 PM: Customers who purchased Lion should still be available to download Lion from the Mac App Store when you option click the Purchased tab.

You can read the MacStories review of Mountain Lion here.

Mountain Lion: The MacStories Review

Given how important Mountain Lion — the latest version of OS X, available today — is to Apple’s ecosystem and unification strategy, its announcement was rather unusual. For the past decade, Apple has been relying on media events and developer conferences to serve as the stage for official introductions to major new versions of its desktop operating system. At WWDC 2002, Steve Jobs famously kicked off the event by giving a eulogy for Mac OS 9 as part of the transition to OS X; in 2009, Snow Leopard — the last version of OS X before Apple’s rebranding of “iPhone OS” to “iOS” — was officially unveiled at WWDC in front of over 5,200 developers; and in October 2010, Lion, the eighth major release of OS X, was formally announced and demoed at Apple’s self-hosted “Back to the Mac” media event.

But as Phil Schiller told Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, with Mountain Lion Apple has started “to do some things differently”. On February 16th, 2012, Apple fans and industry watchers checking their Thursday morning news witnessed Apple’s most surprising OS X announcement to date: instead of being unveiled to the press at a media event, Mountain Lion roared into existence as dozens of blog posts were published simultaneously by selected journalists, who had been given “product briefings” and demo copies a week in advance. With Mountain Lion, Apple decided to let the OS speak for itself, saving a proper introduction for WWDC 2012 where a near-final version of the OS was demoed (alongside some new features) and released to developers.

The way Apple handled Mountain Lion’s announcement may have felt unusual at the time, but in hindsight, it made perfect sense given the nature of the upgrade and the way Apple has encouraged letting its mobile and desktop operating systems coexist and benefit from each other.

Mountain Lion Review: PDF Version

Support MacStories and get a beautiful, DRM-free PDF copy of all our Mountain Lion coverage, including this review and exclusive Tips & Tricks.

Buy "MacStories Features: OS X Mountain Lion"

Buy “MacStories Features: OS X Mountain Lion”

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Cover image by ehtesham/Shutterstock.com

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