Apple Starts Unleashing Mountain Lion

Sooner than expected, Apple Thursday started previewing a developer-directed beta of Mountain Lion, its next-generation Mac OS X 10.8, due out late this summer. It’s borrowed some more features from iOS like the popular and unlimited iChat-replacing iMessages IM as well as Notes, Games Center and Reminders and changed the names of Mac’s Address Book to Contacts and iCalc to Calendar, making the two operating systems more alike – you can see where this is going, right? Mountain Lion also integrates with Twitter and Apple’s own iCloud. Documents created on Macs will be available and synced with iPhone and iPad. There’s a Gatekeeper system to vet software, a way to use Apple TV as a screen, and it adds features for the Chinese market in support of Chinese web sites like Baidu. All told there are reportedly 100 new features.

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