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OS X Mountain Lion Will Be Released Today

Arthur

By Arthur
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Arthur

Arthur

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The rumours were true. :)

 

As part of its quarterly earnings press release, Apple has confirmed that OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the latest version of its desktop operating system, will be released via the Mac App Store today. Priced at £13.99 ($19.99), Mountain Lion brings a number of elements from iOS to the Mac with new features including Notification Center, expanded iCloud support, Reminders, a revamped Messages app, and more. We took an in-depth look at an early preview of OS X 10.8 back in February, and Apple has also detailed each of the 200+ new features you'll find inside the OS starting tomorrow. When the moment does finally arrive, you'll need to be running either Mac OS X Lion or the most recent version of Snow Leopard (10.6.8) to upgrade. (Source)

 

http://i.imgur.com/psF1K.jpg

Arthur

Arthur

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It's like Lion, but nicer... :)

 

But what exactly do users get for their twenty bucks? In short: a nicer, more polished version of Lion. There’s definitely new stuff: iCloud document storage (more on that in a bit), Messages (which is more than just a renamed version of iChat — it supports iMessage), Notification Center (which I really like on the Mac; it’s perhaps the feature I’ve missed the most over the last few months testing the Mountain Lion betas when going back to my main machine running Lion). More back-to-the-Mac stuff from iOS, like standalone apps for Notes and Reminders, and convenient system-wide “share sheets” for sending content via email or messages and to websites like Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, and, soon Facebook. (Facebook integration is not included in OS X 10.8; Apple says it will come in a software update “this fall”.) AirPlay Mirroring is a gem of a feature — a shining example of Apple’s “all our stuff works together seamlessly” philosophy. The new voice dictation feature is accurate, simple, and convenient — a huge accessibility win for anyone who has trouble typing.

 

But Mountain Lion isn’t billed as a blockbuster release, and it isn’t priced like one. It’s just nicer. And it’s the little things, the attention to detail, that show it best. I’ve spent most of my time testing Mountain Lion on a 2010 11-inch MacBook Air. I’ve noticed that wake-from-sleep times have gotten faster over the course of the beta period. And the MacBook Air woke from sleep just fine on Lion, by the historical standards of Apple notebooks waking from sleep. But “faster” isn’t fast enough, and the Air now feels like it’s getting pretty close to the instant-on wake-from-sleep feel of an iOS device. (Source)

Fazza

Fazza

Posted
Posted
:(

 

http://i.imgur.com/Dnvlq.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/33nR0.png

 

This happened the last time.

 

Try again later, in a week or two and demand will have settled down.

 

Perhaps they should get some Dell or IBM servers that can handle the demand...

Arthur

Arthur

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This happened the last time.

Maybe I was lucky, but I managed to download Lion within minutes of it being released.

 

Perhaps they should get some Dell or IBM servers that can handle the demand...

Apple do use IBM servers in one of their data centres. :)

Rozzer

Rozzer

Posted
Posted
:(

 

http://i.imgur.com/Dnvlq.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/33nR0.png

 

Getting the same here :( Think its because I have server on my laptop.

 

Going to have to wait until I can update it on my air at home :(

 

Ross

Zoom7000

Zoom7000

Posted
Posted (edited)

I just downloaded it, took a nap and just finished installing!

 

Oh btw, for those of us who might want to install it from scratch using a USB (which is what I did) this will help you to create a bootable USB - Serial Serveur » Lion DiskMaker (US)

 

Update: And the first thing to happen is my MacBook freezes during the final setup stage! :@

Edited by Zoom7000
Norphy

Norphy

Posted
Posted

Well, I've got it going now. It seems OK so far, my Mac hasn't caught fire anyway.

 

There have been two things which have annoyed me though:

 

1) The Mail client doesn't support RSS feeds any more! When I opened Mail, they just weren't there and I'm damned if I can remember all of the ones I was subscribed to!

2) Airplay mirroring doesn't work on my mid 2010 iMac.

andy_nic

andy_nic

Posted
Posted
managed to download it in 2 hours and install took about 30mins, better than last year lion download which started at 5pm and didn't finish till 7:00 am the following morning
Arthur

Arthur

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1) The Mail client doesn't support RSS feeds any more! When I opened Mail, they just weren't there and I'm damned if I can remember all of the ones I was subscribed to!

This may help...

 

Step One - Get the URLs from Apple Mail

This is actually pretty simple as it turns out, simply execute the following script - extract-rss.sh. Save it somewhere (I'll assume your downloads folder), open a Terminal session and enter:

 

chmod a+x ~/Downloads/extract-rss.sh
~/Downloads/extract-rss.sh

 

Replace "~/Downloads" with whatever folder you saved the script to. Feel free to open it and take a look. It's not my most spectacular script, but what the heck, it works right!

 

This script will create a file in your Home folder (the one with your username in Finder) called "RSS.txt". Open it in TextEdit and copy the entire content. We'll need the contents of this file in the clipboard for the next step. (Source)

 

or

 

Using the Mail RSS Exporter app, I was able to export the feeds into an OPML file, but guess what? Of course Google Reader wouldn’t take it because it was formatted incorrectly. I put this blame more on Apple’s part than the exporter app. I have a feeling it’s their crappy treatment of RSS that’s done this. But at least I was able to open the exported OPML file using some Omni program that came with the Mac. And I could read the names of the blogs I had to subscribe to. And I manually visited every website to get the URL to manually add to Google Reader. This is ridiculous. (Source)
Arthur

Arthur

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2) Airplay mirroring doesn't work on my mid 2010 iMac.

I think Apple made the right decision. Without Intel's QuickSync technology to do the realtime H.264 encoding, AirPlay Mirroring can slow your Mac down quite a bit... :(

 

Mountain Lion AirPlay mirroring v. AirParrot: fight! « Ars Technica

 

Mountain Lion's integrated AirPlay mirroring support only works with the following Mac models:

 

  • iMac—Mid 2011 or newer
  • Mac mini—Mid 2011 or newer
  • MacBook Air—Mid 2011 or newer
  • MacBook Pro—Early 2011 or newer

If your Mac isn't on that list, your won't ever see an AirPlay option in Mountain Lion's menubar.

 

What separates these Macs from other Mountain Lion-compatible machines is that these are the only models that have support for Intel's QuickSync technology. What confirmed this requirement for me was the fact that my Retina MacBook Pro switched to integrated Intel HD4000 graphics even when otherwise running on the discrete NVIDIA GT 650M GPU. No matter what you are doing or what resolution you are running, AirPlay Mirroring in Mountain Lion requires an integrated Intel HD3000 or HD4000 graphics processor and its QuickSync technology to work, full stop.

 

The upside is that if you have a supported Mac and are running Mountain Lion, AirPlay Mirroring works as advertised. The downside is that older machines, and all Mac Pros, are left out of the "official" AirPlay party.

 

AirParrot offers significantly more flexibility and wider compatibility than AirPlay Mirroring. But the differences highlight a philosophical distinction between the "Apple way" of doing things and what users might otherwise want.

 

As we noted earlier, AirPlay Mirroring is dead simple to use. Aside from optionally changing the resolution, there's basically no configuration or control involved. You turn it on, it works, and you turn it off when you're done. The hardware-based QuickSync compression makes streaming smooth at high frame rates, and has very little lag. Specific hardware is required to give the end-user this optimized experience, though, so Apple limits the feature to those machines.

 

AirParrot, on the other hand, enables a much wider variety of hardware to stream to an Apple TV. But the experience on lesser hardware isn't as straightforward or as smooth. There's more noticeable latency, the frame rate may be choppy or inconsistent, or you may have to settle for more highly compressed output.

 

AirParrot's real-time scaling relies on significant CPU power, too, which can cause your machine's fans to make a lot of noise or other apps to slow down. Mountain Lion's AirPlay Mirroring, on the other hand, barely blipped the CPU when I tested it, as the QuickSync hardware does most of the heavy lifting. AirParrot's developers note that setting your Mac to the native resolution of your Apple TV (either 1280x720 or 1920x1080) can significantly reduce CPU usage, as can limiting the frame rate or reducing video quality. But doing so still requires user intervention.

 

Effectively, Apple trades higher or more recent hardware requirements for a simpler, smoother user experience. AirParrot trades complexity and CPU utilization for more features and wider compatibility. If you have a compatible machine and are already running Mountain Lion, AirPlay Mirroring will probably satisfy your needs. But if you don't have compatible hardware, AirParrot is definitely worth considering. Just be prepared to tweak your settings to suit your Mac's capabilities.

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