Signs point to OS X Mountain Lion launch on July 25

Apple will be holding "overnights" in its stores on July 24 to prepare for a July 25 launch of Mountain Lion, according to a new report.

Mountain Lion OSX is pacing in its cage, awaiting release.

CNET - Apple could be planning to launch OS X Mountain Lion on July 25, according to a new report.

According to 9to5Mac, citing sources, Apple has informed some employees at its retail stores that they'll need to plan for an "overnight" on July 24. Overnights have become a key indicator that something new is coming to Apple's retail stores. Overnights mean that employees work outside their stores' open hours to prepare their location for the next day's new sale. Generally, that means Macs, iPhones, or iPads -- but not always.

If 9to5Mac's sources are to be believed, this time around it means OS X Mountain Lion.

More

Is Apple's OS X Mountain Lion on Early-Release Track?

PCWorld - Apple may release OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion earlier than expected, according to a report by a popular blog and clues found within the release dates of the three developer previews of the new operating system.

On Tuesday, AppleInsider, citing an unnamed source, said that Apple's European arm was training new staff to answer queries about Mountain Lion. In the past, Apple has limited the training window, possibly to avoid leaks from the new staff about undisclosed features.

AppleInsider speculated that the staff hiring and training may mean Apple will debut Mountain Lion at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which opens June 11 in San Francisco.

The release dates for Mountain Lion's developer previews also may hint at early availability.

Apple has shipped three OS X 10.8 developer-only previews so far, on Feb. 16, March 16 and most recently, April 18.

Those dates are ahead of the schedule Apple set last year when it fed developers a stream of previews for OS X 10.7, aka Lion, which went on sale July 20, 2011.

Mountain Lion's trio of previews were 8, 15 and 25 days earlier than the first three Lion previews: The former is now more than three weeks ahead of the latter's 2011 timetable.



If Apple keeps to the established pace and seeds one more preview to developers -- Lion offered four last year, then a so-called "gold master" build before hitting the Mac App Store -- Mountain Lion would go on sale June 25, with the gold master ready June 6.

That last date may be a tad early, as Apple opens WWDC the following week. It seems improbable that the company would preempt a ready-for-sale announcement at WWDC by releasing a gold master of OS X 10.8 several days earlier, entailing a risk that the news would leak.          More

OS X – Dig deep into Lion: The best overlooked, underrated features

17 useful features every OS X Lion user should know about

Computerworld – Apple billed this summer’s release of Mac OS X Lion as having more than 200 new features, but most coverage of Lion in the intervening months has focused on only a handful of them. While iOS-like navigation and app-launching interfaces, autosave/restore capabilities, AirDrop file sharing and an emergency restore partition are by all means important, there are a lot of helpful tweaks and enhancements that can easily be missed.

After spending several months really getting to know Lion, I’ve uncovered a plethora of little-talked-about functions that are well worth knowing about. Here are more than 15 new and useful features in Lion for you to explore.

What other unsung features have you discovered in Lion? Share your tips in the article comments.

File grouping in Finder windows

Lion’s well-known All My Files smart folder gives a bird’s-eye view of everything on your Mac with files separated by type — images, PDFs, text-based documents, spreadsheets and so forth. Each type of file displays preview icons of various files that you can scroll through, much as you would using cover flow view in the Finder or iTunes.

This file grouping option is the default for All My Files, but you can use it for any folder you’re looking at in icon view (but not in list, column or cover flow views).

Grouping files by type is useful, but the Finder’s new Arrange menu in the Finder window toolbar also lets you group files and subfolders by several different criteria, including by the application that created each file (or that is associated with the file if that application isn’t installed on your Mac); by the date they were last opened, added, modified or created; by the file sizes; and by the Finder label assigned to them.

Using the icon view in any Finder window, you can group 

files by a number of different criteria.

Protection for location information

Like the iPod touch and Wi-Fi-only iPads, Lion can use known Wi-Fi networks to determine the approximate geographical location of your Mac. This information can be requested by websites and other applications, as well as used with iCloud’s Find My Mac feature. The new Privacy tab in the Security & Privacy pane in System Preferences lets you choose whether your Mac can determine your location and, if so, which apps are allowed to use your location information.            More

Coming Soon: OS X, Ocelot? Apple Running Out Of Cats

macgui.com

Apple is running out of big cats.

Ten years ago, Apple introduced the first major release of its OS X operating system, Cheetah. Since then, all seven new versions of the operating system have been named after big cats.

The cats give the Cupertino,Calif-based company’s software an aura of power, elegance, and beauty. “I tell my students one of the values of wildlife is symbolism,” says Reginald Barrett, a professor of wildlife biology at UC Berkeley. “They use them to sell cars, computers, and God knows what.”

The problem: there are only so many kinds of cats. In March 2001, Apple released Cheetah. In September of 2001, Puma arrived. Jaguar stalked into the market in August 2002. Panther slunk along in October 2003.

Tiger bounded onto the Mac in April 2005. It was the first version of OS X to run on Intel’s processors. Leopard arrived in October 2007. Snow Leopard padded onto the scene in August 2009. That version dropped support for Apple’s older PowerPC processors.

Finally Lion — which incorporates a few tricks learned from Apple’s iPad — was released in July. Apple hasn’t said anything, publicly, about the next version of its OS X operating system.


First they’ll have to come up with a name. That could be hard. All of the animals Applehas used come from Felidae family in the Carnivora order of mammals. Tiger, Lion, Jaguar, and Leopard all come from the subfamily known as Pantherinae. Cheetah comes from the other still-living subfamiily, felinae.

There are a lot of other cats left. None of them are particularly intimidating though. The Eurasian Lynx, can weigh as much as 66 pounds. Even less fearsome: the Eurasian Lynx’s North American cousin, the bobcat; the ocelot — the biggest of the dinky Leopardus genus; and felix catus, the domestic cat.

Apple hasn’t tapped a third group of Felidae, now extinct, known as the Machairodontinae. That subfamily includes smilodon, also known as the ‘saber-toothed cat.’ “That name is so long,” Barrett says. “It seems like they’d want to go with something like Cougar before they went with Smilodon or saber-toothed cat.”              More