WWDC 2012: Apple’s Mountain Lion makes Mac more like the iPad
Your MacBook may soon be more like a supercharged iPad.
At the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple showed off eight of the 200 new features of its latest operating system, Mountain Lion, that will be making that happen. For example, Messages, the paid-text message killer, lets you text from your Mac to other Apple devices.
Other features that will make your Mac more like your mobile devices are alerts that show up like banners, location-based reminders and Notes (which you can open in separate windows) that will now all sync across your devices.
Photos: The new MacBook Pro with Retina Display
Also, in the iOS vein, Mountain Lion has a Notification Center that puts all of your banners and alerts in one place. And you can toggle the notification center on or off.
No, Siri isn’t coming, but you will be able to have a call-and-response interaction with your Mac. Dictation, a somewhat scaled-down version of the personal assistant that showed up in the latest iPad, is included in Mountain Lion.
And iCloud support is built into the new OS. So you can keep your mail, contacts, calendar, Messages, Notes and Reminders synced. And iCloud, which Apple says has 125 million registered users, has a new feature called “Documents in the Cloud.†You can sync within Pages, Keynotes, Preview and TextEdit.
Mountain Lion will keep on working even while it sleeps. A feature called PowerNap fetches data, updates software and backs up your data in Time Machine even when its in sleep mode.
Safari is also getting an update that will include a tab for iCloud and an omni-bar-style tool that lets you search from the address bar. Bye-bye search box. Plus, you can use gestures to find your way through the tabs.
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