Mac OS X Mountain Lion Features

Apple just unveiled the next major upgrade to its core software, OS X. It’s called Mountain Lion. It bringing a lot of the features its customers use ever day on iPhones and iPads over to the Mac. The general public will have to wait until summer to download the release for themselves.  The developer preview version of Mountain Lion was live and available to Apple’s legions of app makers.

iCloud plays a greater role on the Mac side, syncing calendars, contacts and email across all your devices. As iCloud and the Mac evolve, Apple's vision of a unified experience across all devices is becoming clearer. Apple is offering a free copy of its newly released operating system, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, to those who purchased a new Mac on or after June 25.

With iOS 5, Apple introduced iMessage for its mobile devices, which emulated BlackBerry Messenger's ability to send messages either as text messages or pure data. Now iMessage gets a desktop friend: Messages, which replaces iChat and acts as an instant-messaging app (for accounts on AIM, Google Chat and others) that's iMessage-friendly. You can easily send photos and videos via messages, and you can launch FaceTime from the app, too. It's as yet unclear how it'll handle text messages sent to specific phone numbers, but it's another step toward a unified chat experience. It'll be another milestone in the Mac OS X history.