Mountain Lion, unveiled only seven months after Lion’s release, has been made available to the public 12 months after its predecessor - which, according to official numbers from WWDC 2012, has been downloaded over 26 million times. Lion, a major change in terms of underlying technologies and visual presentation, was announced in October 2010 and released nine months later in July 2011 (almost two years after Snow Leopard). The key to understanding Mountain Lion - which is available for $19.99 ($10 less than Lion) on the Mac App Store - is the rapid pace of development that Apple now sees as the cornerstone of familiarity and user experience across iOS and OS X devices. Support MacStories and get a beautiful, DRM-free PDF copy of all our Mountain Lion coverage, including this review and exclusive Tips & Tricks.īuy “MacStories Features: OS X Mountain Lion” The way Apple handled Mountain Lion’s announcement may have felt unusual at the time, but in hindsight, it made perfect sense given the nature of the upgrade and the way Apple has encouraged letting its mobile and desktop operating systems coexist and benefit from each other. With Mountain Lion, Apple decided to let the OS speak for itself, saving a proper introduction for WWDC 2012 where a near-final version of the OS was demoed (alongside some new features) and released to developers. On February 16th, 2012, Apple fans and industry watchers checking their Thursday morning news witnessed Apple’s most surprising OS X announcement to date: instead of being unveiled to the press at a media event, Mountain Lion roared into existence as dozens of blog posts were published simultaneously by selected journalists, who had been given “product briefings” and demo copies a week in advance. At WWDC 2002, Steve Jobs famously kicked off the event by giving a eulogy for Mac OS 9 as part of the transition to OS X in 2009, Snow Leopard - the last version of OS X before Apple’s rebranding of “iPhone OS” to “iOS” - was officially unveiled at WWDC in front of over 5,200 developers and in October 2010, Lion, the eighth major release of OS X, was formally announced and demoed at Apple’s self-hosted “Back to the Mac” media event.īut as Phil Schiller told Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, with Mountain Lion Apple has started “to do some things differently”. For the past decade, Apple has been relying on media events and developer conferences to serve as the stage for official introductions to major new versions of its desktop operating system. I have.Given how important Mountain Lion - the latest version of OS X, available today - is to Apple’s ecosystem and unification strategy, its announcement was rather unusual. You might also want to click Yes on that one. I’ve pointed out with a blue arrow the tweak that will make it visible again. If you are a power user you may resent the fact your user Library folder is hidden by default. I’ve pointed them out with red arrows in the image below. Run Lion Tweaks and you will see it has two options for changing the leather skin, one for Address Book and another for iCal. The easiest way to change the leather look is using Lion Tweaks. They do not apply to Mountain Lion (10.8 developer version). These instructions apply to OS X Lion (10.7.x). If you also find the leather theme distasteful, here’s a way to change it to a silver metal aluminium look or theme. I’ve not figured out a way to return the functionality to Address Book, but there I very smartly changed the leather look. Apple in their wisdom felt it necessary to remove that view mode. For instance, I use to keep Address Book in a 3-panel mode with my address books listed to the left, the contacts listed in the middle, and the details of the selected contact on the right. Not only did they come with a gaudy looking leather theme, but Address Book was lacking functionality I liked and had become accustomed to. When I “upgraded” to OS X Lion a few weeks ago I felt my iCal and Address Book were seriously downgraded in the process.
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