Matt Alexander over at the Loop on the state of affairs with Mountain Lion:
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For many, the announcement of OS X Lion was viewed with a great deal of negativity. Perceived as subverting the complexity of OS X, Lion was painted by many as an unwelcome agent of change – an entity seeking to castrate the strength of the Mac. Boasting nascent implementations of iOS features, many were quick to point accusatory fingers at the budding mobile operating system. OS X was courting a younger, sleeker companion, and its personality was starting to change – starting to dress a little better and clean up its act. Many felt betrayed.
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Matt Alexander writing at The Loop

Moving In Together

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With Mountain Lion, Apple has stepped up the game of brining the two ecosystems of Mac and iOS closer together. The trend started (arguably perhaps) with Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event in which iLife was touted to have taken cues from iOS design, FaceTime was brought to the Mac, the Mac App store was announced, the MacBook Air was introduced, and oh yeah, Lion was announced with many features reminiscent of iOS.
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My article on where Apple is headed with OS X. Head on over to find out what I think about where Apple is going.

In which I write about the future of OS X

The iOS-ification of OS X

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Apple should embrace the utility of sandboxing by shifting their focus away from sandboxing only Mac App Store titles, to a strategy that would sandbox virtually every Mac app, inside the store or out. Given the current limitations of sandboxing, a significant number of developers will not adopt the technology, so its usefulness to users and to the security of the platform will be diminished. Apple can turn that around so that sandboxing is a worthy counterpart to Gatekeeper, and a technology that any developer in his or her right mind would feel foolish not to incorporate.
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A really good and thoughtful take on Sandboxing. As it is, Apple is completely blowing it. The frustrating thing is the concept is really good and Apple could make it great.

Daniel Jalkut

Red Sweater on Sandboxing

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Sandboxing is a great idea. But if too few developers can use it, most users will never be able to run a sandboxed-apps-only setup, removing much of the purpose of sandboxing in the first place.
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Precisely.

Marco Arment

Marco on Sandboxing

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We have extended the deadline for sandboxing your apps on the Mac App Store from March 1st to June 1st to provide you with enough time to take advantage of new sandboxing entitlements available in OS X 10.7.3 and new APIs in Xcode 4.3.
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Translation: We know there’s issues with the current implantation of Sandboxing. We hope to add a couple more entitlements to the woefully short list to appease you and then implement it rather than really beefing up the idea of Sandboxing and making it work for everyone.

MacRumors

Apple Extending Sandbox Deadline

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2012 could prove to be one of the most interesting showdowns of ideologies in the history of computing. With Mountain Lion, Apple’s underscoring the point they made with Lion last year: a mobile device should run a mobile OS and a desktop/notebook should run a desktop OS … but there should be a pipeline of ideas between the two. That pipeline has been unidirectional so far, but maybe that’s the natural consequence when one OS is so much fresher than the other.
</blockquote>
A good overview and fun read.

Andy Ihnatko

Andy Ihnatko On Mountain Lion

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So it seemed feasible that we’d wake up one day and Apple would decree that all Mac apps must be sold through the App Store.
But instead, Apple went to considerable effort and expense to find a middle ground.
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…
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I have a personal flaw in the form of a small conspiracy theorist who lives in my head. He worried that this may have been created as just a temporary stepping stone — like Rosetta for the Intel transition, or Carbon for the OS 9 to OS X transition — and that one day, the Mac App Store-only option might still be enforced.
But I can’t find it in me to disparage this goodwill effort that Apple has undertaken to not turn every third-party developer upside-down with regard to app distribution. To me it’s a great sign that they’re aware and at some level sympathetic to our concerns, while remaining committed to a high-security experience for users.
Further cementing this feeling is the fact that we were invited to a private briefing at Apple about Gatekeeper a week before today’s announcement. Cabel was told point-blank that Apple has great respect for the third-party app community, and wants to see it continue to grow — they do not want to poison the well. I think their actions here speak even louder than their words, though.
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There is a lot of fearmongering, worry, and download misinformation about Gatekeeper. But Panic is a prominent third-party OS X developer and they don’t seem to be worried about Gatekeeper.

Steven writing on the Panic Blog

Panic About Gatekeeper (see what I did there?)

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Updates to OS X Mountain Lion will be delivered through the Mac App Store, Pocket-lint says it has learned through one of the company’s private product briefings. Present and past versions of OS X have relied on a dedicated Software Update function. In switching to the Mac App Store for patching, Mountain Lion will mimic iOS’ App Store-based update system.
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I hope that means all updates will be funneled through the Mac App Store. On Lion, who knows which of my software will be updated through Software update, and which not. For instance, my older copies of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, which I downloaded from Apple’s website and installed manually, are updated through Software Update. Which has always been strange to me. It seems like Software Update’s purpose was to install updates to built in System Software. That model has been sort of stretched up until the Mac App Store to include any Apple Software. But if Apple just funnels everything through the Mac App Store, there will be much more cohesion.
This will be interesting though:
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Still unknown, though, is whether people will be required to sign up for an Apple ID. An account is normally mandatory for Mac App Store access, but some Mountain Lion owners could resent being forced to use an Apple ID for basic system functions.
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I could see that being a problem. I don’t have a problem with it, but someone might.

MacNN

Software Updates via Mac App Store in 10.8

All of this looks pretty good. You have to respect Apple for their attention to detail.
A couple of my favorites:
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When you move a large file in the Finder, the file icon reflects the progress, just like when you install an app on iOS.
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Sweet.
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Safari has a bunch of small refinements that make it easier to use. First, there’s a unified search bar and address bar, à la Chrome’s Omnibox. URLs are grayed out after the domain name, and the “http://” is stripped out as well.
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Like.
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There are some pretty minor changes to Calendar and Contacts. In Calendar, the calendar’s drop-down menu is gone, replaced by a slide-out sidebar instead.
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yes. Yes. YES!
I complained about the iCal calendar pop-over before in the footnote to this article: <a href="/blog/2011/12/12/not-condescending-but-good#notcondescendingbutgood-fn1">Not condescending, but good</a>
I’ll be glad to have the sidebar back. That pop-over is horrible to use, way too many clicks.
The one thing I’m not sure I like has to do with Safari:
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Tabs scale proportionally now, so if you have two tabs open, they’ll each take up half of the tab bar instead of a fixed width like before. This actually isn’t entirely new, as the Safari 4 beta did the same thing, though Apple axed the behavior before final release.
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I liked Safari 4 Beta’s tabs on top, but not the proportional scaling. The only think I like about Chrome better than Safari, is the tabs on top, and that they don’t scale proportionally. The problem with proportional scaling is that it breaks muscle memory.
I like everything else about Safari way better than Chrome so it’s not worth switching or anything. Perhaps Apple will acquiesce to put the tabs on top again at some point, and not make them scale proportionally but I’m not holding my breath.

Gigaom

Smaller Changes in Mountain Lion

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Apple’s got it covered: the Mountain Lion App Store will automatically detect any app that has historically been updated through Software Update and ask to register it to your Apple ID
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This is great news and a great first step. Now if they would provide third party devs a way to do this also my life will be complete.

Cult of Mac

DVD Installed Apple Software in the Mac App Store

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When Apple announced the Mac App Store, many felt that they were pushing OS X toward a model similar to the iOS ecosystem, in other words, that Mac applications would someday be restricted only to the Mac App Store. One could certainly make the argument that this would be better in many ways for end users. For instance, if applications only came from the Mac App Store, and had to pass through the scrutiny of the app reviewers, then the end user could be assured a high degree of probability that the downloaded application is not malware.
But this model would also not be without problems. We are used to installing any third party application we please. Many called foul on the Mac App Store and warned to stay away from it. Well, at least with Mountain Lion, Apple has not taken that route. But Apple also did not sit still on this issue.
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Yours truly on Gatekeeper at Mac.Appstorm. My editor changed the title to be a bit more sensational (which I’m not a huge fan of, but I see the appeal), and the first 2 paragraphs are a summary also written by my editor. Other than that, it’s my work.

Yours Truly writing at Mac.AppStorm

Gatekeeper

A friend of mine brought up a good point. In the new Messages for Mac Beta when you want to send an iMessage to someone, and you do not already have a conversation started with them, you click on the little “write” icon up on the left to start a new message. Then you must begin typing an iMessage capable Apple ID (email address) or the name of the person you want to send a message to. If you know the person’s iMessage Apple ID, no problem. But if you don’t know or don’t remember it can be confusing because as you type a person’s name, all the email addresses associated with them in your address book will be available as an option to click. However, there is a way to see which email address is associated with an iMessage Apple ID. As you type, and email address start appearing, those that are valid iMessage Apple IDs will have a little blue bubble next to them like this:
<img src="http://appleuserpro.com/assets/uploads/imessage-blue-bubble.jpg" alt="Imessage blue bubble" title="imessage-blue-bubble.jpg">
That little blue chat bubble on the right indicates the email in question is an iMessage capable Apple ID. It seems like Apple could make this a little more user friendly and apparent, but we are still dealing with a beta so we’ll see what happens.

Posts tagged “OS X” from the blog