Written by It seems like Apple is taking another step towards unifying OS-X and iOS. With information coming out about Mountain Lion it seems Apple is moving towards an annual release cycle with Mountain Lion being scheduled for this summer. You may remember five years ago, Apple was borrowing developers from the OS X team to help meet deadlines for the iPhone, but with things moving this quickly, you can really see just how large and successful Apple has become. OS X will come with over 100 new features and HUGE iOS influence. Things are getting far more simplified!
iCloud will be a big part of this release and allow basically everything to be synced between devices so you can start something on one device and continue it on another. A few apps will get new names like iCal, iChat and Address Book – they will simply be Calendar, Messages and Contacts. Now OS X will also have a unified notification center just like iOS. AirPlay Mirroring will let you stream basically everything to your Apple TV. Gatekeeper provides a middle ground between standard apps and App Store apps, signed by a developer but not approved by Apple – not sure how I feel about that one yet…
No word on Siri but as the iPad 3 release date approaches I think we will soon get a good idea if they will be adding the voice assistant to every iDevice in the future. To me it seems like a logical next step. A developer preview is already out and should help developers and Apple get the bugs worked out to meet their summer deadline.
for gate keeper there is three options:
1) Paid developer account – Mac App Store distribution, allowed by gatekeeper
2) Free developer account – Sign apps as an approved developer, not Mac App distribution, allowed by gatekeeper
3) James Dean account – rebel without a cause, no app store distribution, not allowed by gatekeeper
Problem is however gatekeeper is setup by default to allow a Paid and free developer account apps to be installed. You would have to change settings to allow the james dean’s to install apps and not many people will even know how to do that. But since you can be a free dev there is no real reason not to, other than it takes some extra work to do so.