Mountain Lions are coming.

I don't have any hands on experience at this point (and will be under NDA once I do), but looking at the public info, I'm excited for the upgrade. Having lived with an iPad now for 2 full years, I'm glad to see more aspects of it come back to the Mac. I'm also interested in the deeper iCloud integration. That will help to start building more of a bridge between all my devices, be it one running iOS, or OS X.

Messages, already switched to using it as my communications client on the desktop. I can chat to anyone with an iOS device, and also keep my AIM/Google Talk contacts around. I do lose the continuous client feature from Trillian from AIM/GTalk, but I'm okay with that.

I'm also glad to see Apple remaining committed to the desktop side. Moving to a yearly OS X release just like iOS tells me Apple has managed to staff up enough to support both platforms. Compare this to 10.5 Leopard being delayed due to iOS 1.0 shipping on the iPhone in 2007.

I'm interested what people think about this. I'm not a fan of the "tabletization" of desktop operating systems. Granted, I'm sure Apple will pull it off better than Microsoft (I won't be upgrading to Windows 8), but I still don't like where things are going there. It seems like things are getting more and more locked down, and that's exactly why I love getting away from my limiting tablet and getting on my computer where I can do anything I like and do it 10 times as fast...

*edit*
Also, what do you think of them dropping the "Mac" in "Mac OS" Tom? I guess it doesn't really mean anything, and it's still OSX versus iOS...

Color me skeptical. I avoided upgrading to Lion for as long as work would allow me, and some of the things being heralded as improvements in 10.8 seem like steps backward, or sideways at best.

I agree with Matt's comments about things being more and more locked down, and I think it's about more than just philosophy -- these types of things have real, lasting effects. The introduction of "Gatekeeper" means that now if you're a smallish developer and you decide not to publish in the App Store, you're not only losing customers who've already decided that the App Store is the One True Place To Go To Buy Mac Apps, but that your software will also be marked as "unsafe" for many others who haven't made that decision yet, but also haven't changed from the system default of only trusting signed code. (Remember all of those other successful attempts to bring signed code to the desktop? Yeah, me neither.)

I get what they're aiming for, and if the App Store was *only* reviewing apps for malware, vulnerabilities, etc. I could understand. But to get this level of "safety", you are also giving them the power to reject applications for a wide variety of other reasons. The ends to not justify the means.

As for the other stuff, it looks like a mixed bag. The centralized notification thing could work -- I certainly have no love for Growl at this point after their decision to go App Store only, so seeing an alternative show up in the OS could be a nice plus. I have no use for most of the rest of the features they're trumpeting in their promotional materials, so I'm hoping for small tweaks and improvements, and as little iPad GUI creep as possible.

No you aren't. You don't need to be in the App Store to get your app signed. According to the coverage you don't even need to pay, there is supposed to be a free developer account available just for signing apps.

I really do think that Apple made the right call on that one and picked the best defaults.

I may be wrong about the Developer ID programme being free, as I can't find any mention to that now, even though I definitely saw it stated in a couple of bits of early coverage.

Yeah, if there's a free option for non-App Store developers, I can get behind that. On the other hand, Apple has already said that certain APIs (like those for iCloud and the new notification thing) will be limited to App Store apps, which is exactly why I'm skeptical -- they introduce these things with what look like good intentions, but pretty soon, the non-App Store developers are frozen out of core OS functionality. This will not end well.

I can understand why iCloud gets to be App Store only. But yes, I'm sure Apple will make other new features App Store only, to encourage developers to get on board.

I found one of the free references, it was Gruber:

"It’s a system whereby developers can sign up for free-of-charge Apple developer IDs which they can then use to cryptographically sign their applications."

I can't claim that Gruber is always 100% accurate, far from it

And you do have to wonder whether:

a) Apple will allow developers distributing compiled open source apps to sign apps
b) Whether such signing offends GPL 2 in some way

Yeah, but even if they do, I don't imagine the free option lasting long -- after all, part of the reason Apple charges for being published on the App Store is ostensibly so they can support what is by all accounts a very robust testing/certification infrastructure. It's easy, then, to cast the non-App Store developers as freeloaders. The obvious end game is that either they're pushed toward the App Store (with carrots and sticks as mentioned above) or they're asked to foot the bill for testing of their apps.

As I understand it there is no testing of apps involved in the non-App Store option. You apply for a signing key, you use the key to sign your apps locally.

I don't believe they even intend to attempt to verify who you are. The key is just there to act as a kill switch if any of your apps get reported as malware.

But that said, I agree that over time there will be little tweaks to the setup to encourage people towards the App Store.

FWIW I don't think Apple are primarily pushing people towards the Mac App Store in an effort to make loads of cash. The income from the iOS App Store is dwarfed by their hardware sales and I expect the Mac App Store to be the same.

I think they are doing it because they believe it is a better experience for their customers.

To me, a Mac is just a Unix box. Except, unlike something like Linux:

- I never have to futz with basic configuration issues (e.g., printing just magically works).

- Software updates don't break my machine (much).

- I can install all sorts of random Unix utilities without much hassle (e.g., via Homebrew).

- I've got access to commercial software in areas where I want it (e.g., Adobe Lightroom, Creative Suite, Microsoft Office).

So long as all those things are true, I'll stick with a Mac. If, however, I can't just say something like 'brew install nmap' and have it magically work, then that's when I stop buying Macs.

Incidentally, replacing Growl with a system service for notification management is a great idea. If they want to issue some kind of oddball rule that access to this service, or to whatever else, is restricted in some fashion, I'd be curious to know how they enforce that. Will the OS kernel refuse to grant you the right to link against certain dynamic libraries? The only way I could see this being truly enforced would require a fairly draconian kernel. At that point, you don't really have a general-purpose computer any more.

Interestingly Apple have just taken a step to make things like that easier to do. They are releasing a commandline only download of the bits of their dev tools (or rather some of their tools and their builds of various bits of open source) needed to build things without the full Xcode.

Certain aspects of the tablet OS I don't want in my desktop OS. But there are many that I do. Tablets are becoming a way for the OS makers to experiment without the huge issue of legacy. Lion's ability to resume apps and their state even after a kernel panic impresses me, and it came from the tablet side. That same system also enables me to open up an app, work in it, then quit it, resuming later without having to manually save files first. I was skeptical about this feature and it's reliability, but so far it has yet to fail me.

Many of the Mountain Lion changes are to unify parts that make sense to do so. Why does OS X have iCal when iOS has Calendar? Why does OS X put notes into Mail, when iOS has a dedicated Notes app? Mountain Lion corrects those discrepancies. Am I personally bothered by the differences greatly? No. But by eliminating them, it makes it easier for my grandmother to transition between her laptop and iPad without as much context switching.

I'm not as bothered about the skeuomorphism as some people are, so I can't say I'm annoyed by more of that occurring in 10.8. So far they haven't really removed features when doing the conversion.


I'm mostly agreeing with you here, both that Notification Center will probably make Growl less relevant over time. And it is a plus since it brings the Growl type feature to everyone, instead of the few people who knew about it.

I wasn't bothered by the Mac App Store conversion for Growl. $1.99 isn't much at all, and helps support the developers. Seems a cheap way to ensure continued development for at least the rest of the time I'll need it. As nice as getting something for free is, I don't personally expect people to work for free to give me something for free. The MAS conversion also helped insure I have Growl on any Mac I use. It's pretty handy these days to just boot a new Mac, log in, open the App Store, and click Install down a list of apps.


I've seen it too. Macworld didn't specifically call it out as free, but said "A developer signs up for an account and gets a certificate. That’s it. What’s more, these apps have no seal of approval from Apple. Apple never sees them. Developers don’t need to check with Apple before signing apps."

Another useful tidbit from Macworld:



I hadn't given it much thought. Lion already started dropping the Mac part, and it didn't change anything.

Yep, and they worked with the person in the open source community who initially started doing this:
http://kennethreitz.com/xcode-gcc-and-homebrew.html

Things like this help reassure me that OS X will remain a viable option for a while. Sure, the top layer may change to be more user friendly, but they will keep toggles around somewhere for the more advanced users who need to get under the hood. The 10.8, and commitment to yearly releases helps me to believe they will keep OS X and iOS separate, but share ideas where it makes sense.

Right, and that's not my position at all. I enjoy being compensated for my own development work, although I'm in a position where we can release that work open source as well as to our paying customers. So I'd have happily kicked them $2 or even $10 if I wasn't giving 30% of it to the middleman.

I know I'm also giving 30% of my Android app purchases to middlemen, but at least those middlemen aren't making arbitrary decisions about what those apps are allowed to do, or which APIs they can use. (I guess some of the carrier-branded/customized phones do those sort of things, but I don't tihnk the Android Market itself is facilitating that sort of control, and I've managed to avoid using one of those phones.)

I honestly don't see how anyone can look at what's happened over the last year or so and see non-Apple store applications thriving in the future. The developer's choice is to be a second-class citizen (with second-class API access) or fork over 30% of their gross. This is a very hostile act toward the development community, and I don't think integrating homebrew comes close to making up for that hostility.

Ooo. So can you cross-compile for MacOS now?

Peter

"thriving" needs to be defined. My perspective is that the 3rd party app market, including the one over the internet wasn't thriving at all. In store boxes with software did ok, and decentralized distribution over the internet did ok as well. The places it was really thriving is the advanced user market, of which we all fit into, or the enterprise market buying and mass deploying software. The home consumer market wasn't a big area for 3rd party apps to thrive.

General consumers have been burned by malware on Windows, and told it is because they downloaded something. They also didn't generally know where to look for software, nor know how to sort through all the possibilities to find what they wanted. At $50 a pop, it was also a high barrier to even try something and toss it aside if it doesn't work.

Most of the non savvy computer users I know simply stuck to what the OS came with, and perhaps a few packages like Microsoft Office or Quicken. When my mom got an iPhone, she started grabbing apps on her own, just by browsing the integrated store and looking at the top of the charts. This has expanded more to her iPad as well. While she isn't forking over $50 per app, she is part of a growing market segment willing to pay $1 or $2 per app. Economies of scale come into play here to turn this into a thriving market even with the low price mark.

On the games side, the industry is also seeing the massive growth potential for these centralized stores/portals. Steam has helped greatly, as has Facebook and the mobile app markets.

At the end of the day Apple is indeed going to put consumers ahead of developers on their priority list. But I think they have a pretty solid understanding of the importance of developers and the needs to balance it a bit. Sure, they are going to do things that are somewhat hostile on the development side to improve the consumer experience. But honestly, I think thats they way it should be. Place the little bit of pain and hoop hopping where a few developers have to do it, instead of spreading a bit of pain and hoop hopping across the entire customer base.

This is an official Apple package of all the common GCC toolchain bits for OS X. XCode has always installed these alongside the GUI and OS X frameworks. Now people can just download a 200MB package instead of a 2-3GB package. It's not a cross compiling solution.

Cross compiling OS X on Linux has been possible, though it involves bring framework files over from a real OS X box. Not sure about the legality.

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Cross_compiling_OSX_on_Linux covers the work needed for that particular Pascal IDE program. I didn't find it worth the hassle compared to just having a Mac Mini accessible over SSH.

I don't have anything in the App Store at the moment. And I wish Apple didn't take a 30% cut as I think it's still far too great - 15% would sit better with me. However, I'm excited at getting something in there because I know it's going to receive an order of magnitude (at least) more exposure than anything I've ever done myself outside the store. Sell-through also seems to be better as a percentage of viewership, at least according to some devs who have discussed stats.

Right now my sales all come via my web site - and some volume business via email. These visitors come with a roughly 33% split from Google, direct and referrals.

The Mac App store is going to expose my products to millions of people who would never otherwise stumble upon a link to my store/site.

I'll make some comments purely as a consumer. Since the introduction of the Mac App Store, I am extremely reluctant to buy Mac software any other way. This is mostly because I've been burned over the years by developers that upgrade their software to a point they they want more money. Often times, the old version is fine, but they won't provide it for download anymore. And, more than once, I went to buy the updated version at a discount by providing my old license key, and the key isn't recognized buy their checkout system. It's extremely frustrating.

Mac App Store prevents this, and if things follow the iOS App Store customs, updates won't ask me to cough up more money. I also like that applications purchased in the Mac App Store are licensed for use on all my Macs. Not having to keep track of license keys is another bonus.

As for 10.8, I'm not so hot for it since I think Lion is still more finicky than Snow Leopard. Am I the only one that can't drag an item from the dock's Downloads stack straight to the trash bin on the dock? This used to work in 10.7, but now it doesn't. It certainly works in 10.6. There are other annoyances that I can't think of at the moment, but they're enough for me to keep 10.6 on my Mac Mini.

iOSification of Mac OS is mostly a mistake in my eyes. The Launchpad in 10.7 is completely worthless. The newest version of Airport Utility is also worthless to the point I can't believe it's not an april fools joke. Thankfully, you can still get Airport Utility 5.6 which has the old/useful UI, but how long will that last?

I think Mission Control is superior to Exposé, but I don't really see that as taking inspiration from iOS aside from the greater usefulness of multitouch trackpads. As for other multitouch gestures, I immediately turn off about half of them. This includes the "natural" scroll direction.

The many changes to gestures are a pain, but I'm going to grind thru the learning curve.

In my small (IT) world, Apple has succeeded in progressively making itself irrelevant over the past year or so.

They may be all over iEverything, but they have abandoned any consideration of usAnything.

Out of curiosity (and this is more the grander point the developers made when moving to MAS) why didn't you? They had a donate button on their project page for years. I'll admit I was also bad about this, I knew it was there, but never clicked it. But I didn't hesitate to click the buy button. I'm not really sure I can explain my own reasoning, beyond saying it was easier to remember to give them money when they forced it, vs kindly asking every time I clicked download.


I'm curious why you say this, is it tied to the death of the XServer? I'm seeing more Apple stuff at work these days, not less. Started with the iPhone, and is growing to include iPads, and even the occasional Macbook. One of the recent meetings I was in had 7 people with iPads out of 17, with the others using paper notebooks. This is across 3 different companies I've worked for. None have really rolled out any formal integration beyond providing support for mail and VPN, but they are allowing it vs blocking them, and in some cases providing the equipment to those who want it.

Well, I first downloaded Growl on my Powerbook in 2005, probably before they even had a Donate button on the site. I don't know exactly when they added update notifications, but I just started using those to keep up with updates instead of visiting the web site. I'm sure I noticed at some point that they were asking for donations, and I'm not saying I donate to every FOSS project that puts up a button, but I do donate to many, and Growl would have been one of them if they were asking for the donations more prominently.

I am *all* for developers begging loudly for support, and even for choosing to make their apps pay only if they want to, but the fact that the Growl team chose to use the App Store as their only distribution channel was a significant negative for me. If 10.8 wasn't getting its own notification thing, I'd probably have given in at some point, but my policy right now is to always choose the non-MAS purchase option when possible, and if it's not, try to find another app I'm happy with.

It is not like I never had my doubts about Apple's ability to "get" the enterprise. I was waiting for Apple to offer a server product that included redundant power supplies. Didn't happen.

But yes:

- abandoned the xServe line.
- poor ergonomics (for old folks) in the later iMac line.
- dropped Samba from distribution in Lion.
- uber-buggy LDAP support in Lion and patches made it worse.
- quasi-support for NFSv4 that will likely never get out of alpha.

Indeed we see more folks coming into our environment with various Apple iWhatver thingies, but they are all tied to "I". Business processes really depend not on "I" but on roles and in that respect I think Apple ie either clueless or does not care. I am guessing the revenues from iTunes mean the latter is the case.

While my old Power PC XServes lacked a dual supply, the Intel ones did.

A couple of years ago I was convinced I could replace every desktop PC at work with a Mac, nowadays I'm not so sure. In fact, the one area I thought was a no-brainer (video edit) would make me think twice now.

It seems to me Apple have abandoned any interest in the pro market in search of the mighty iDollar.

I've got mixed feelings on this point. Back in the day, before Apple went all revisionist-history on its promises to support ZFS in OS X 10.6, I purchased a beefy Mac Pro for home, on the assumption that it would be the perfect platform for running ZFS. Had I known this was going to be the plan, I instead might have bought some sort of NAS box for my disks, but I figured, hey, why not keep everything in one box. Simplicity!

Then Apple pulled it and hasn't made any serious noises about alternatives.

That Mac Pro is now pushing three years old and at least shows no signs of going belly up. I've had no hardware failures, disk failures, or anything else going particularly wrong. About my only complaint is that wake-on-lan doesn't always work. (But, from my brief exploration of generic PC motherboards, many boards that support ECC memory are really server-class boards, so they don't support hibernation. At least my Mac Pro can go to sleep.)

That's what makes it worth 30% juice. :-) That and the payment processing.

In the enterprise software world, a reseller typically gets 40% margin, and a brick & mortar retailer would expect more. Given how incredibly easily the Apple app stores give developers access to a huge market, I think 30% is not greedy at all. In my opinion, Apple is providing huge value for that 30%. Processing all the financial transactions is probably worth at least a third of that, when you consider the expense you would incur to take credit card transactions for small-dollar purchases.

I dunno. Hosting's cheap, and payment processors like Paypal and Google Checkout don't take anywhere near a 30% vig. Sure, at some point when you get big enough, you'll want to take CC transactions directly, but even then you're nowhere near 30%.

Comparing independent developers to enterprise resellers seems wrong to me. I'll grant that if you're *really* small, it's better to take 70% of a small pie with no overhead, and if you're *really* big, maybe the App Store is a bargain... But it seems to me anyone with monthly sales in the hundreds or maybe low thousands could probably keep more than 90% of their gross by doing it themselves, in which case we're back to how much the App Store is going to increase sales, and, frankly, I don't think the case has been made that it'll make up the difference for the average developer.

Arguably, the App Store is a gamble. If you win the gamble, you get popular and the store reinforces your popularity and you skyrocket in earnings. On your own, it's harder to get that pop.

Ah, our last was a G5. I stopped paying attention.


Pretty much.

The next iteration of the Mac Pro is what I'm wondering about. There were rumors that it would be rack mount friendly, which could make up for some of the lost possibilities by discontinuing the xServe. Though it's somewhat telling that Apple's own datacenter in North Carolina doesn't run on Mac hardware, so who knows. They may just have decided the dedicated rack mount server market wasn't for them, with OS X Server never really gaining much of a foothold over it's decade+ lifecycle.


This was believed to be a GPLv3 issue. Apple could either stick with Samba 3.0 (GPLv2), and never gain the newer protocol introduced in Vista/Server 2008, or dump Samba and go with a solution more compatible with the licensing OS X carries. From what I understand, they chose to write their own replacement, not sure if it was based off some different SMB implementation or if they started from scratch.


I won't deny that their success with iOS hasn't changed their focus quite a bit. And I would say it's probably the right thing for them to do, considering that in 2011, they sold more iOS devices then total Macs since the introduction in 1984.

With that said, I don't personally see Apple in the near term abandoning the pro markets that they currently have a stake in. In my eyes, 10.8 shows that Apple is going to remain committed to producing a desktop class OS for a while longer. They did slip up a bit when they rolled out Final Cut X, and pulled the previous version initially. Recent updates have been adding features lost in the changeover, specifically targeted at the pro market.

I can see why it would be harder to trust them now if you are into the high end video production field. Apple is going to have to do something to make up for that over time, and my feeling is that it was partially due to other projects being rushed to meet what Steve wanted to see before his passing. It's somewhat telling that Job's last performance on stage was to introduce iCloud, something that will be the cornerstone of their consumer efforts for a long time to come.

It is probably a mistake for me to lump the "Pro" market with the business/enterprise market. I could see them keeping some stock in "Pro" realms that I know very little about -- like small group collab/production, but for business I think they are toast.

A fair point on your part re: the Samba GPL decision, but they could have worked the problem to a different conclusion, I think, if they desired.

The notion that they might try a comeback in the server space with a more flexible Mac Pro I think is wishful thinking though maybe they could offer a non-interoperable workgroup solution (and you might say they already do if the current "Mac Pro Server" config suits your SOHO needs.)

In the end, though, their server products were overpriced relative to Linux running on less sexy commodity hardware and there were lots of other aggravations -- like perl and other packages were generally out of date. Add to those the abandonment of platforms like WebObjects (something I am having to address recently).

I remember sending an email to an Apple rep asking if they couldn't make an iMac that had an adjustable-height display. I'm not sure but I thought I heard a chuckle.

None of this is particularly new or shocking. As Apple morphed Appletalk into Bonjour -- protocols that map to their workgroup philosophy -- we were always busy running around turning it off on any new printers that might arrive

Anyhow, sleek, cool-looking stuff, but an increasingly dubious value proposition outside of the individual iSphere.

Perhaps, but it would have been hard if Apple already had their planned security lockdowns in mind for OS X back then. The GPLv3 isn't really compatible with signing based systems, due to the inability to replace the shipped binary. I'm not sure if Apple had any input on the conversion to GPLv3, but they did have a person on staff with commit access to Samba. From reading some of the discussions from the Samba folks, they seemed to realize GPLv3 would inherently be incompatible with OS X. Not sure why, but they had assumed Apple would be happy just sticking to maintenance releases of 3.0.

Dan earlier mentioned ZFS, which ended up also dying due to licensing concerns. Oracle just wouldn't come to an agreement Apple was willing to live with on something as critical as the filesystem for their OS. And sadly there is precedent here, with the situation between Veritas and Microsoft coming to a bad end relating to Dynamic Disk technology in Windows 2000.


They do sell a VESA mounting kit for the iMacs, for what it's worth. Not sure when they started though.

WebObjects was a surprise to me, considering how heavily Apple used it. Not really sure about the backstory there, nor am I sure what they replaced it with for their somewhat recent store revamp.

IMHO, the biggest value is the gigantic number of users they "bring" to the developer. That is hugely valuable to small operations, I think.

You may be right that a smallish operation can keep their costs below 10% for transactions, possibly, but they'd spend a fortune to get the kind of access that the app store gives them via traditional marketing methods.

Presence in the app store is not a replacement for traditional marketing. The App Store can get crowded and while someone may find your app because they'll use the search feature, they're not necessarily any more inclined to be looking for your specific app than they would be if you weren't in the app store (and only had your own site).

The huge benefit is you're only competing for eyeballs with other apps for that platform and not a million web sites with terms that may match on searches - when someone is searching directly within the App Store.

Google presence is still going to be important and so too will other sites reviewing and/or pointing to your product.

Paying 10% to process payments is low if you're looking at Kagi or eSellerate. It's bat-shit high if you're looking at a proper merchant account or PayPal (payments standard or even Payments Pro - where a customer would not know at all you were using PayPal for processing).

I suspect Apple must be paying well under 2%.

ZFS, yes too bad.

Happily, we have it running on OpenIndiana. Did I ever think I'd see the day? Back to the Solaris Future!

Seems like zfs is available as an add on: http://tenscomplement.com/

...though not quite launched yet...

Yeah, I'd be willing to pay for a commercial ZFS port if it really worked, and particularly if it was bootable. And extra especially if I could run some sort of migration tool that would translate my current HFS+ hard drives into ZFS and do it in place. (Or, at least, restore to my new ZFS partition from my Time Machine backup without too much pain.)

This OS is about to be released within a few weeks - maybe even next week.

I haven't tried it in a few months now but will be giving it a go again with the GM release on Monday. Fingers crossed it doesn't pooch too much.

I'm already running Safari 6 and it's the reason I'm adding to this thread. Does anyone know how to disable the full-width tabs and return back to the old tab look?

Full length tabs are a usability horror - it makes it very hard to tell a window has any tabs at all, or how many for that matter.

I also hate the unified URL/search bar because it breaks too much functionality, but I can probably live with that one for now. Maybe someone can help me figure out how to display search history in some manner other than changing focus to the address bar, deleting clearing it out and then moving down using a cursor key. It works, but it's ugly and then I don't know how to get the original URL back without reloading the page.

I also have a problem paying $20 for Mountain Lion considering how bug and problem ridden Lion is. If Anything I'd like to be paid a couple of grand when I update for the troubles Lion has caused.

Today is the day. For Mac users looking to upgrade, or who have done so already, I'd recommend glancing at this list:

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html

There are tons of little fixups and tweaks compared to Lion, some easy to miss. Still working my way through the John Siracusa epic review (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/).

I've been running the GM on my machines pretty much since it came out, and I've not been hit by any regressions from Lion. With the release today also comes the iWork update for iCloud. This weekend I'll spend some time moving my old iDisk documents into iCloud and decide if this is what I want. If it doesn't work out, I'll look into an iDisk replacement.

Gatekeeper so far hasn't been a problem, and I plan on keeping it in it's default setting of "Mac App Store and identified developers". When you do an upgrade install, any existing unsigned app is still allowed to run. Any new unsigned apps will be blocked via double click, but can be allowed by simply context clicking and choosing open. Once you open it once, the system stops blocking it.

Not really sure on the tabs thing Bruno, perhaps a hidden preference will be revealed now that the OS is officially out. For history, there is always the History - Show all History menu item. The unified bar hasn't bothered me yet, since it seems to still do the right thing and visit internal servers when I type their names. Chrome in the same situation enjoyed tossing me to a google search, and usually required a manual http:// to get it to go to internal servers.

I updated this morning. Ran into two snags so far. The version of Parallels 7 I had on my Mac Mini was slightly out of date. After the 10.8 upgrade, OS X made a new folder on my hard drive called "Incompatible Applications" and moved Parallels there. I just installed the latest version of Parallels 7 and moved the whole Incompatible folder to the trash. Not a big deal. This wasn't a problem on my Macbook since that instance of Parallels was already at the latest version before 10.8.

10.8 also broke compatibility with the last freeware version of Automatic. I'm now running the trial of the paid version. If I stick with it, my Mountain Lion upgrade costs will have doubled.

Also, purchasing Lion Server doesn't seem to automatically get you Mountain Lion Server. So that interface/app doesn't work now. Steve wants another $20 from me, but I don't think he's going to get it.

I'm going to move my main machine over to 10.8 tomorrow and install Lion onto a development (external) drive. I have a long list of Lion bugs that I haven't yet reported to Apple, so I'll verify them all against ML to see if any have been fixed.

Yesterday I reported the fact that Safari 5.1.7 and Safari 6 in Lion could not be used to obtain certificates from Apple's developer site for signing apps. I had to use Firefox. Ugh.

I put up a new beta of my own software last night that contains signed binaries and a signed installer to avoid any hiccups in ML. Had to move to a new package type using a new packaging until as well because I can only seem to sign flat packages with the installer cert. Oh yeah, installers need a different cert than apps, and uses a different mechanism (command line tool) to sign.

I am bit worried about the security option that allows only App Store app installs. I wish they hadn't included that one. Hopefully they'll never make it default. The security settings seem to only affect the ability to install apps, not run them from what I can tell. I can run unsigned apps off an external drive when running 10.8 even with the App Store setting set.

That bothered me, too, when I was trying to make Chrome work for me. Enough that I came up with a reasonable workaround.

When I try to access an internal domain I've never been to, I just type the domain name in the omnibox. It does a Google search and it must also poll for a site there, as it give me a bar that asks if I meant to go to "http://whatever". After choosing yes, every subsequent access of "whatever" takes me to the internal domain.

Has that not been your experience?

It's been ages since I used Chrome regularly (there are other things about it that made it frustrating for me to use), but I had enough different places to go internally that that wouldn't have helped enough quickly enough.

Personally, I don't want autosearch to happen anyway. If I typo something, I'd rather it tell me that than waste time trying to tell me what I meant, and I have keyword search engines set up for when I do want to search.

Can I upgrade straight from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, or do I have to pay the upgrade tax twice?

You can go right from 10.6.8 to 10.8, and you only pay once at the $19 rate. License is valid for any personal Mac you own, and this includes installation into a VM running on a Mac. There is no DRM or serial key, so it's just an honor system.

Just like in earlier previews and betas, Airplay Mirroring is only available to recent (2011+) machines. Now that's a fucking rip-off. It's the main reason I bought an Apple TV. I can still mirror to it from an iPad, but seriously, mirroring from the Mac was the most important.

Indeed.

Airplay Mirroring requires pretty hefty realtime H.264 encoding on the device sending video. For the desktops, this means a processor with Intel's Quick Sync tech.

The iDevices that can do Airplay mirroring also have similar hardware encoders. It's more prevalent on the mobile side due to HD video capture being a common feature.

That's a fair answer that I can't dispute. But I'm very suspicious of Apple's motives since excluding Siri and turn-by-turn navigation from the iPhone 4 for no technical reason. Especially when they still sell the iPhone 4 and 3GS.

I could buy an iPhone 4 tomorrow for $99 on-contract. Then, I'm married to it for two more years when it doesn't even support the features of today. I just find that incredibly scummy and I doubt Apple store employees are very upfront about it with potential customers.

Umm, I'm next to positive that the NVIDIA and ATI/AMD chips on many (other) Mac machines can easily outperform what Intel has in those CPUs. But I know that NVIDIA is woefully behind on current generation hardware let alone able to provide any kind of support for older gen stuff like what's in my 2009 MBP.

Apple went 100% NVIDIA this year, completely shutting out AMD from every single SKU, and it's one of the reasons they're over a year behind with many of their platform announcements. Lots of NV screw ups and inability to meet quality and quantity standards.

The funny thing about that link Tom, I used to have to explain technical stuff to the two ATI people Anand mentions all the time.

Grabbed this link from Gruber's blog: http://tidbits.com/article/13147

Some small changes/items in 10.8 which are not necessarily obvious. Glad to see "Save As" brought back, even though it requires an additional keystroke modifier. IMO, the whole versioning and auto-save thing is ill-conceived, poorly designed and poorly implemented.

Also glad to see auto-locking of files is gone.

My impression was that while siri runs on iPhone 4, it doesn't have a mic that's tuned for isolating your voice at arms length. Even with the fancy mic hardware I still find it infuriating to use for anything other than setting a reminder.

Siri was working fine on the iPhone 4 when it was available in the App Store prior to Apple's acquisition.

One can also argue that Apple needs server horsepower to run Siri and why take on additional expenditure without also taking on a new revenue stream? That's the theory I put my faith in. At the same time it's one way to differentiate the newer product from the old.

Actually, no.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-s...3-2100-tested/9

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-...33-5.html

Quick Sync is damn impressive. I know, it's easy to doubt Intel as they have fumbled quite a bit in the past. But their tech is outperforming desktop class GPUs by a decent bit for H.264 encoding on both speed, and for NVidia way ahead in quality. I'd imagine the NVidia 320M (the common GPU/chipset in 2010 Macs) lacked both the performance and power efficiency Apple was looking for. And the 9400M common in 2009 definitely wouldn't make the cut.

9600M on the better notebooks. Maybe the NV chips of that time were crap after all.

Apple is moving heavily on using the GPU for general-purpose computing. OpenCL was slow to catch on, but they're concentrating heavily on similar technologies right now - along with Adobe and a few others. The main push right now seems to be for concurrent processing, so you'll benefit from everything your CPU has to offer at the same time.

Oh, does anyone know if 10.8 has airplay video support in for example QuickTime Player? In such a case the sending device only has to wirelessly transmit the H.264 video without transcoding, like with iPhone and iPad models that don't support the mirror feature.

Or support for images would be nice too, allowing one to run a slideshow. I don't actually often need full mirroring. The iPhone/iPad can do this, but getting photo content from a computer onto those devices is next to impossible in the first place.

10.8 update done.

Used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable second backup of my boot drive (the other backup is on Time Machine).

Booted off the new backup and erased the built-in SSD on my MBP using Disk Utility. Should I have done something special here to get the SSD to top performance?

Then I installed 10.8 onto the SSD and used migration assistant to move over my user account, settings and apps.

I had to use Software Update to get Java which isn't included by default and then update both Little Snitch and GlimmerBlocker, also re-doing my network proxy settings which weren't carried over.

So far so good. I expect I may have to fiddle with at least the PHP installation to get some of my Automator processes working, but I won't have time to check that out until tomorrow. Next week I'll start checking against the bugs I found with Lion.

Mail is in the process of "importing" my messages - I hate this step with every OS update.

I also just noticed that I can't resize this text box in Safari 6. Hmmm...

Ok, what I would think would be by far the easiest thing to handle, migration of email and associated settings is somewhat pooched.

Mail's display was somewhat wrong when it fired up and all my rules and signatures are gone. Server settings seem to have survived.

Tom, any tips on a quick migration of this stuff after the fact?

I'd say wipe out anything Mail related in Library. So ~/Library/Mail. ~/Library/Mail Downloads and the com.apple.MailMigratorService.plist in Preferences. Also go nuke ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail.

Open up the Time Machine backups and restore ~/Library/Mail along with the com.apple.Mail preference in ~/Library/Preferences. And any other Mail related folders from the backup.

This should trigger another run of the migration assistant. The ~/Library/Containers is a new one to me, looks like this may be the sandboxing, and possibly the migration didn't grab everything to put in there for some reason.

I didn't have a "com.apple.MailMigratorService.plist" file. But I nuked the others and restored the mail folders and preference files.

Opening Mail now. Fingers crossed. 82000 messages - 3 minutes of importing (on SSD)....

It didn't work. Same as before. There's only a single rule and it's one Apple put in there in this version. "News from Apple"

This is getting to be painful. If I could easily export rules I'd boot back up to Lion and do that... I'll see about that. I searched Google for the issue I'm having without luck finding anything.

I've already tried copying over the two rules files from Lion with no luck.

Found a thread about it from 3 days ago using Google. But, when I log in to my Apple account, it says I'm not allowed to read it. Google cached copy produces an error. The search results show a large enough snippet that I know it's the same symptom:



Can anyone else open that thread? Unlike many other threads, this one forces a login. I've had that happen before, but I've always been able to read the topic afterwards.

I have a feeling that Mountain Lion will be at least as bug-ridden as Lion was, likely worse. Check this one out:

I thought I'd turn on NOTES in the iCloud preferences to allow syncing. It prompts for a ".me" account and you can't do anything unless you provide one. It indicates one will be created if you type in an address.

OK, I found a limitation - a stupid one, but one nonetheless. So I fire up the notes app and write a small temp note, then close the app.

Launch it again and I get a prompt telling me that I have an unsynced note and whether I'd like to share notes through iCloud. I pick YES and it drops me back into the Notes UI. Nothing looks different.

I click the Notes menu and pick the "accounts item" - it's the "Mail Contacts and Calendars" pref pane, which is most definitely a little confusing next to iCloud because it includes an iCloud item that duplicates the entire iCloud pref pane UI inside a box. Ugh...

Notes is TURNED OFF in here, even though I was asked about it and said yes. So I click to turn it on. And it DOESN'T prompt me for a .me account - it asks if I want to merge notes and I say yes. It then stays ON. If I go back to the iCloud pref pane Nota is also now turned on in there.

But... Quit System Preferences, go back to the Mail... pref pane and Notes is again OFF.

Lame.

Oh, Mail in iCloud pref pane also asks for .me account, but in the other pref pane in the iCloud section it turns on without a fuss. But then can't be turned off. Until you quit and restart System Preferences when it's magically already off.

Super lame.

I worked very closely with people from Apple along the entire development cycle of every OS from 1996 to 2005. Apple has always had an insanely hard time preparing a new OS in 2-3 years. Now they want to do TWO OSes per year. It was evident with Snow Leopard things were on the way downhill, proven as a matter of fact with Lion. Mountain Lion hasn't done anything to change my perception at this point. I've never had these kinds of issues with any Mac OS X release after 2003.

I get the same error. Very annoying, to say the least. Sorry I can't help.

Software Update now uses the Mac App Store - which has the same horrible UI/experience as the previous version.

If you hide updates they appear to be gone forever. Selecting the item "Show all software updates" from the Store menu makes that option go away but the updates are never again displayed...

..Until you quit and restart Software Update or the App Store app.

Arrrrgh.

Update on Mail rules.... More puzzling. The rules files are actually intact. They contain all my rules, but they aren't showing up in Mail.


Mail's rules are now kept in an entirely different file, "SyncedRules.plist" which is also XML as before, but with a very slightly different format. I noticed a couple of small changes, but a copy-paste from the older file only produced a couple of dozen blank rules in Mail. The first time.

With more careful cutting and pasting of only the rules, and keeping the rest of the new file I was able to get them all in there. They were all turned OFF by default so I had to manually turn them on in the UI and then manually select all the new mail and manually pick the "Apply Rules" menu item.

I'll look at the signatures tomorrow. I've had enough of this hair ripping out for tonight.

Arrrrgh.

Just got back on the computer for the first time since last night and... All the rules I inserted are GONE. WTF.

EDIT: (a little while later....)

More poking reveals a file called SyncedFilesInfo.plist which contains the path to the rules file previously mentioned, the empty signature file and a smartmailboxes file.

This file is a preference telling Mail that each of these is being Synced with iCloud. Something I've never set up and something that explains what's happened.

My guess is that Mail went to sync with iCloud for these items and since nothing is in iCloud it cleared all my local content instead of merging it. I still consider it an egregious bug, but at least I'm confident as to the cause of the issue.

There's also another rules file called UnsyncedRules.plist that I've now copied my rules into. The came into Mail already turned ON, unlike before, and they've survived multiple quit/restarts. My hypothesis is that these will not be blanked because as the filename implies, they're not going to sync with iCloud.

In terms of the larger picture, there is absolutely no option that I've seen to specify that any of this stuff should be or shouldn't be synced. Now any way to control whether or not a newly created rule gets synced or not - the test rule I made did end up in the SYNC file.

Clusterfuck.

Clearing the contents of or deleting the file SyncedFilesInfo.plist causes Mail to crash on startup - completely unrecoverable. Wow.

I've verified that a few bugs from Lion have been fixed in Mail. But I keep finding more new bugs, some of them critical:

New to Mountain Lion: Reply to a message in one of your local folders and your FROM address will *not* be automatically set to the recipient address of that original message (what has always happened). Instead it will be set to the primary address of the email account that appears first in your list of inboxes in your mail window's source list.

New to Mountain Lion: Compose a new message while a message in local folder is selected and the FROM address will be automatically set to the first address of the first account listed in the source list. It has always used the recipient of the message that was currently select (if it was one of your defined addresses) before. This one I don't mind too much.

From at least Lion 10.7.4: Creating a NEW message will not use the selected FROM address if that address is not the first address listed for a particular account. Example, an account with 4 email addresses listed, cannot send from addresses 2-4. It's always been possible to list additional email addresses (like aliases) with every account. Now it's impossible to use them to send mail. The copy of the message in SENT MAIL shows up correctly with the selected email address as FROM, however the mail actually gets sent out as from your first email address listed in the drop-down menu of all your email addresses. *

* The drop-down list of email addresses are sorted in the order of INBOXES listed in the mail window's source list, but if a change is made to the inbox order, the email list is only updated after quitting and restarting Mail.


These three are very dangerous. With the first two it's possible to catch the issue before sending out the email, with the third it's not. It's impossible to use these other email addresses in Mountain Lion to compose new messages.