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Today was an interesting day. Out of the blue, Apple announced that the next version of its flagship operating system, Mountain Lion*, is available for a developer preview. It was a pretty big surprise since most of us are more focused on next month’s iOS 5.1 keynote and the new hardware that is coming along with it. What was even weirder was that Apple did not have a traditional keynote event for this announcement. Instead, it was a quiet introduction on the frontpage of Apple.com and earlier in the week, individual presentations with prominent Mac bloggers and technology critics. Anyway, I’m just going to talk about some of my thoughts on the new operating system.

1. The continuation of the iPadification™ of OS X. Notice how I didn’t use Mac OS X? Well, Apple has decided that the Mac part of the OS X branding is no longer necessary, suggesting that the eventual merge of iOS and OS X is still planned. If you recall, iOS used was created from OS X 10.4 and evolved on a slightly different path until features seemed to start appearing in OS X from iOS starting with Mac OS X 10.6. Now it’s coming around full circle with Mountain Lion. Apple has placed its bets on a different version of the personal computer than Microsoft. With Windows 8, Microsoft has adopted a new UI styled like the Windows Phone Metro UI, but also made the traditional desktop components touch based. Apple has yet to show their cards on a touchscreen Macintosh computer, but if iOS and OS X merge, one has to imagine that a single set of UI elements would be easier to deal with than two. But even so, Apple seems to be saying that the realm of desktop computing doesn’t need to be touch based. Although the feature sets seem to be merging, Apple says that the traditional desktop still has a very different role to play than the tablet devices. To me, this seems odd since the general trend in computing is to create the one device consumers can carry around with them that can access/store all their data. However, the more likely explanation is that this is just another step towards the unification of iOS and OS X just like Lion was, signifying the end of the X series of the Mac and preparing for something entirely new. Something both Microsoft and Apple seem to be agreeing on is the consistency of the development environment. In Windows 8, most of the traditional .NET, and Win32 aspects of applications are gone. Microsoft is now relying on HTML 5, JavaScript, C# and Silverlight to deliver applications to consumers. This is a big change for Windows developers, but it means that if you develop for Windows 8, you can develop for Windows Phone just as easily. This is exactly what Apple is doing. By having the Mac App Store and OS X and iOS being so closely related, once you know Objective-C, you can write applications for both platforms with ease. With this in mind, consumers can expect a consistent experience on both Microsoft and Apple’s platforms in terms of how applications look and function. Continuing with the iPad like features, the new Notification Center is a very welcome addition. Apple is moving past Growl (one of my favorite applications) and implementing it as a system API for most applications to access and consolidates the location of important information into one place. Finally, the AirPlay mirroring should have been added a long time ago, so it’s nice to see Apple bringing it back to the Mac. I can’t wait to be able to mirror my screen to a TV without the need for any cables.

2. The consolidation of apps. In Mountain Lion, Apple has begun the process of smushing similar applications and services together. This definitely is a step in the right direction. The new messaging application uses the iMessage protocol for a much nicer IM experience. It also combines all the functionality of iChat and FaceTime into one application so that users don’t need to keep their dock cluttered with multiple applications for a similar purpose. The OS X + iOS combination continues with Apple renaming iCal to Calendar, Address Book to Contacts, adding Notes to replace Sticky Notes, and adding Reminders. For the most part, these changes are for consistency between both OS X and iOS, but also for putting things where they make the most sense. Most technical people knew where to look for managing certain aspect of their data such as services connected to their CalDAV account or IMAP account, but the non-technical people were lost. Apple aims to fix this by putting things in places where you would expect them to be. This will definitely help the majority of Mac users by making it easier to find things and it cuts down on the number of extraneous applications on your hard drive.

3. Ugly UI choices. As previously mention, Apple has added Notes and Reminders to OS X 10.8 and have continued a (personally) disconcerting trend. The inclusion of “real life” inspired UI design just looks ugly. It wastes screen real estate and clashes with the system’s UI elements rather sharply. Although the design makes sense physically, meaning if it were a physical object, it doesn’t make sense on a computing device. Please stop making ugly applications and focus more on the aesthetics of a cleaner UI that integrates well into the system.

4. Yearly release cycles seem to be coming. First, a look at the history of the more recent Mac OS X releases:

10.4 Tiger - April 2005 to November 2007

10.5 Leopard - October 2007 to August 2009

10.6 Snow Leopard - August 2009 to July 2011

10.7 Lion - July 2011 to Current

The trend for Tiger through Snow Leopard was about two years worth of major OS updates. Now it seems that Apple is applying their iOS strategy of major yearly updates to OS X. To me, this seems like an odd move. When Apple first started working on iOS, they took a lot of their software engineers away from the Mac and Application development teams to complete iOS. Ever since, most of those people haven’t gone back. Fiscally, Apple is making a ton of money off of iOS and rightly so, they sell a lot of devices. Not to mention that the iOS market share has surpassed the Mac market share. Because of this, most of Apple resources have been focused on iOS and Mac development and Application development has been rather slow. I have also noticed that Mac OS X patches and the operating system itself have become buggier and that it takes Apple a much longer period of time to fix the issue. If Apple is going towards yearly releases for OS X, they must expand the amount of resources spent on OS X if they want the new cycle to succeed. The full desktop operating system is much more complex than the mobile device operating system and takes a greater amount of time to test. I want my system to be really stable as I depend on it greatly, but yearly releases tend to make me think that a system will be pushed out the door no matter what and then all the problems will be fixed in later updates, rather than a longer development period. To me, a long development and testing period of more than a year is required for a desktop operating system just due to the complexity of it. Granted, Apple’s software engineers are really bright, but unless the team is composed of 5,000+ über programmers, I want the development phase of the OS I’m going to be using to take longer so that I can trust it. Another issue that comes with yearly release cycles is the possibility of sped up cycle of hardware obsolescence. With iOS devices, Apple usually supports them for one year and then when the new OS comes out, either the feature set for the old device is reduced or the device is made incompatible. For most people, their machines last them four or more years and don’t upgrade their hardware for quite some time due to the financial investment. Apple computers aren’t cheap so if Apple is planning on having this cycle influence an increase in Mac purchases, I don’t know if it will succeed. Also, most consumers don’t upgrade their operating systems very often as they don’t really understand what an operating system is. Apple needs to change the way people perceive the OS and make it clear as to why consumers should invest the time to perform an update of such a magnitude once a year. Price is also going to be another factor. If the $30 price tag stays around or is even lowered, I think Apple will have lots of success, but it leads me to believe that we’re basically just “subscribing” to an operating system rather than purchasing it. With a “subscription” model, this opens the door for Apple to limit the amount of innovation per release. It used to be (from 10.0 to 10.5) that every 10.x release was a major change in how the Mac operating system worked. Now the trend has been steady, incremental improvements. To me, this wouldn’t be a problem if Apple adopted the Service Pack method that Microsoft uses with Windows. The way I see it, Apple just releases a few minor and a few major features every release, making each release just “meh” instead of “wow!”. It also begs the question, just what is Apple aiming at innovating? Since 10.8 is going to be purely from the Mac App Store (i.e. no physical media whatsoever) how is Apple going to innovate the EFI that every Intel Mac runs on? How are they going to innovate the decrepit HFS+ file system that absolutely needs to be replaced? How are they going to innovate on the kernel? Apple is focused on the visible parts of the operating system, but OS X is past due for some major love under the hood.

5. The ecosystem is moving towards a closed one. OS X Mountain Lion contains a new security feature called Gatekeeper. This allows Mac OS X to improve upon the Protect X functionality of Lion by keeping a malware blacklist but also an application/developer blacklist. This is a necessary improvement that Macs have needed for quite some time since they have become more popular as of late. However, it also has some drawbacks. it order for an application to not be flagged by Gatekeeper, a developer has to sign their application with a free Apple Developer ID Certificate. Now, the way I understand how this works is that the application has to be compilable in the Mac environment using Apple’s developer tools to enable the signing. This may be something that developers avoid due to build requirements and dependencies. Luckily, Gatekeeper has settings that make it very usable and can be manually overridden when enabled. The problem arises in the future when all applications have to come from the Mac App Store due to the iOS + OS X merge. The Mac App Store limits an application’s functionality(and is subject to some very arbitrary rules) but gains a vastly secure user experience. It’s just that some applications simply cannot exist when they abide by the App Store’s rules and sideloading applications make become impossible and even if you can sideload an application(only signed though), Apple may revoke the developer’s certificate if they feel like the application does something that Apple doesn’t like, e.g. BitTorrent. The upside to this is that applications will be sandboxed and developers are forced to use the more recent APIs and tools in their applications. The other downside is that Apple is limiting the use of certain APIs to applications that don’t come from the Mac App Store, which in my opinion, significantly hurts the developer as Apple can create a huge difference between App Store and Non App Store versions of the same application. Some people might say that I’m just being an alarmist, but in all reality, what’s stopping Apple from closing off the Mac ecosystem? Just look at Microsoft, they’re locking their devices from running entire operating systems with their Secure UEFI initiative, why can’t Apple do the same like they did with the iPhone and iPad to the Mac? They probably won’t if user opinion and vocality aren’t in favor of it, but Apple likes to make decisions for the user regardless, so only time will tell.

6. More iCloud. Apple has added some functionality in iCloud so that it now syncs the user’s documents and data. This is a much welcome addition to the OS as you don’t have to rely on third party services like Dropbox to keep your data safe at an offsite location. However, the usability of this expanded service depends on the amount of storage space and the types of data allowed to be backed up.

7. Social and Sharing. The inclusion of all the new sharing functionality, integrated Twitter, and Game Center all point to a more unified and connected experience that Apple wants users to have while using their products.

All things aside, 10.8 looks to be another polished release from Apple. Apple is targeting a spring 2012 release, so hopefully in the coming months there will be some more information about all the new features they are adding that they haven’t mentioned/haven’t added yet in the developer preview.

* Side Note: Cougar or Liger would have also been an acceptable name for OS X 10.8.