Mountain Lions are coming.

I don't have any hands on experience at this point (and will be under NDA once I do), but looking at the public info, I'm excited for the upgrade. Having lived with an iPad now for 2 full years, I'm glad to see more aspects of it come back to the Mac. I'm also interested in the deeper iCloud integration. That will help to start building more of a bridge between all my devices, be it one running iOS, or OS X.

Messages, already switched to using it as my communications client on the desktop. I can chat to anyone with an iOS device, and also keep my AIM/Google Talk contacts around. I do lose the continuous client feature from Trillian from AIM/GTalk, but I'm okay with that.

I'm also glad to see Apple remaining committed to the desktop side. Moving to a yearly OS X release just like iOS tells me Apple has managed to staff up enough to support both platforms. Compare this to 10.5 Leopard being delayed due to iOS 1.0 shipping on the iPhone in 2007.

I'm interested what people think about this. I'm not a fan of the "tabletization" of desktop operating systems. Granted, I'm sure Apple will pull it off better than Microsoft (I won't be upgrading to Windows 8), but I still don't like where things are going there. It seems like things are getting more and more locked down, and that's exactly why I love getting away from my limiting tablet and getting on my computer where I can do anything I like and do it 10 times as fast...

*edit*
Also, what do you think of them dropping the "Mac" in "Mac OS" Tom? I guess it doesn't really mean anything, and it's still OSX versus iOS...

Color me skeptical. I avoided upgrading to Lion for as long as work would allow me, and some of the things being heralded as improvements in 10.8 seem like steps backward, or sideways at best.

I agree with Matt's comments about things being more and more locked down, and I think it's about more than just philosophy -- these types of things have real, lasting effects. The introduction of "Gatekeeper" means that now if you're a smallish developer and you decide not to publish in the App Store, you're not only losing customers who've already decided that the App Store is the One True Place To Go To Buy Mac Apps, but that your software will also be marked as "unsafe" for many others who haven't made that decision yet, but also haven't changed from the system default of only trusting signed code. (Remember all of those other successful attempts to bring signed code to the desktop? Yeah, me neither.)

I get what they're aiming for, and if the App Store was *only* reviewing apps for malware, vulnerabilities, etc. I could understand. But to get this level of "safety", you are also giving them the power to reject applications for a wide variety of other reasons. The ends to not justify the means.

As for the other stuff, it looks like a mixed bag. The centralized notification thing could work -- I certainly have no love for Growl at this point after their decision to go App Store only, so seeing an alternative show up in the OS could be a nice plus. I have no use for most of the rest of the features they're trumpeting in their promotional materials, so I'm hoping for small tweaks and improvements, and as little iPad GUI creep as possible.

No you aren't. You don't need to be in the App Store to get your app signed. According to the coverage you don't even need to pay, there is supposed to be a free developer account available just for signing apps.

I really do think that Apple made the right call on that one and picked the best defaults.

I may be wrong about the Developer ID programme being free, as I can't find any mention to that now, even though I definitely saw it stated in a couple of bits of early coverage.

Yeah, if there's a free option for non-App Store developers, I can get behind that. On the other hand, Apple has already said that certain APIs (like those for iCloud and the new notification thing) will be limited to App Store apps, which is exactly why I'm skeptical -- they introduce these things with what look like good intentions, but pretty soon, the non-App Store developers are frozen out of core OS functionality. This will not end well.

I can understand why iCloud gets to be App Store only. But yes, I'm sure Apple will make other new features App Store only, to encourage developers to get on board.

I found one of the free references, it was Gruber:

"It’s a system whereby developers can sign up for free-of-charge Apple developer IDs which they can then use to cryptographically sign their applications."

I can't claim that Gruber is always 100% accurate, far from it

And you do have to wonder whether:

a) Apple will allow developers distributing compiled open source apps to sign apps
b) Whether such signing offends GPL 2 in some way

Yeah, but even if they do, I don't imagine the free option lasting long -- after all, part of the reason Apple charges for being published on the App Store is ostensibly so they can support what is by all accounts a very robust testing/certification infrastructure. It's easy, then, to cast the non-App Store developers as freeloaders. The obvious end game is that either they're pushed toward the App Store (with carrots and sticks as mentioned above) or they're asked to foot the bill for testing of their apps.

As I understand it there is no testing of apps involved in the non-App Store option. You apply for a signing key, you use the key to sign your apps locally.

I don't believe they even intend to attempt to verify who you are. The key is just there to act as a kill switch if any of your apps get reported as malware.

But that said, I agree that over time there will be little tweaks to the setup to encourage people towards the App Store.

FWIW I don't think Apple are primarily pushing people towards the Mac App Store in an effort to make loads of cash. The income from the iOS App Store is dwarfed by their hardware sales and I expect the Mac App Store to be the same.

I think they are doing it because they believe it is a better experience for their customers.

To me, a Mac is just a Unix box. Except, unlike something like Linux:

- I never have to futz with basic configuration issues (e.g., printing just magically works).

- Software updates don't break my machine (much).

- I can install all sorts of random Unix utilities without much hassle (e.g., via Homebrew).

- I've got access to commercial software in areas where I want it (e.g., Adobe Lightroom, Creative Suite, Microsoft Office).

So long as all those things are true, I'll stick with a Mac. If, however, I can't just say something like 'brew install nmap' and have it magically work, then that's when I stop buying Macs.

Incidentally, replacing Growl with a system service for notification management is a great idea. If they want to issue some kind of oddball rule that access to this service, or to whatever else, is restricted in some fashion, I'd be curious to know how they enforce that. Will the OS kernel refuse to grant you the right to link against certain dynamic libraries? The only way I could see this being truly enforced would require a fairly draconian kernel. At that point, you don't really have a general-purpose computer any more.

Interestingly Apple have just taken a step to make things like that easier to do. They are releasing a commandline only download of the bits of their dev tools (or rather some of their tools and their builds of various bits of open source) needed to build things without the full Xcode.

Certain aspects of the tablet OS I don't want in my desktop OS. But there are many that I do. Tablets are becoming a way for the OS makers to experiment without the huge issue of legacy. Lion's ability to resume apps and their state even after a kernel panic impresses me, and it came from the tablet side. That same system also enables me to open up an app, work in it, then quit it, resuming later without having to manually save files first. I was skeptical about this feature and it's reliability, but so far it has yet to fail me.

Many of the Mountain Lion changes are to unify parts that make sense to do so. Why does OS X have iCal when iOS has Calendar? Why does OS X put notes into Mail, when iOS has a dedicated Notes app? Mountain Lion corrects those discrepancies. Am I personally bothered by the differences greatly? No. But by eliminating them, it makes it easier for my grandmother to transition between her laptop and iPad without as much context switching.

I'm not as bothered about the skeuomorphism as some people are, so I can't say I'm annoyed by more of that occurring in 10.8. So far they haven't really removed features when doing the conversion.


I'm mostly agreeing with you here, both that Notification Center will probably make Growl less relevant over time. And it is a plus since it brings the Growl type feature to everyone, instead of the few people who knew about it.

I wasn't bothered by the Mac App Store conversion for Growl. $1.99 isn't much at all, and helps support the developers. Seems a cheap way to ensure continued development for at least the rest of the time I'll need it. As nice as getting something for free is, I don't personally expect people to work for free to give me something for free. The MAS conversion also helped insure I have Growl on any Mac I use. It's pretty handy these days to just boot a new Mac, log in, open the App Store, and click Install down a list of apps.


I've seen it too. Macworld didn't specifically call it out as free, but said "A developer signs up for an account and gets a certificate. That’s it. What’s more, these apps have no seal of approval from Apple. Apple never sees them. Developers don’t need to check with Apple before signing apps."

Another useful tidbit from Macworld:



I hadn't given it much thought. Lion already started dropping the Mac part, and it didn't change anything.

Yep, and they worked with the person in the open source community who initially started doing this:
http://kennethreitz.com/xcode-gcc-and-homebrew.html

Things like this help reassure me that OS X will remain a viable option for a while. Sure, the top layer may change to be more user friendly, but they will keep toggles around somewhere for the more advanced users who need to get under the hood. The 10.8, and commitment to yearly releases helps me to believe they will keep OS X and iOS separate, but share ideas where it makes sense.

Right, and that's not my position at all. I enjoy being compensated for my own development work, although I'm in a position where we can release that work open source as well as to our paying customers. So I'd have happily kicked them $2 or even $10 if I wasn't giving 30% of it to the middleman.

I know I'm also giving 30% of my Android app purchases to middlemen, but at least those middlemen aren't making arbitrary decisions about what those apps are allowed to do, or which APIs they can use. (I guess some of the carrier-branded/customized phones do those sort of things, but I don't tihnk the Android Market itself is facilitating that sort of control, and I've managed to avoid using one of those phones.)

I honestly don't see how anyone can look at what's happened over the last year or so and see non-Apple store applications thriving in the future. The developer's choice is to be a second-class citizen (with second-class API access) or fork over 30% of their gross. This is a very hostile act toward the development community, and I don't think integrating homebrew comes close to making up for that hostility.

Ooo. So can you cross-compile for MacOS now?

Peter

"thriving" needs to be defined. My perspective is that the 3rd party app market, including the one over the internet wasn't thriving at all. In store boxes with software did ok, and decentralized distribution over the internet did ok as well. The places it was really thriving is the advanced user market, of which we all fit into, or the enterprise market buying and mass deploying software. The home consumer market wasn't a big area for 3rd party apps to thrive.

General consumers have been burned by malware on Windows, and told it is because they downloaded something. They also didn't generally know where to look for software, nor know how to sort through all the possibilities to find what they wanted. At $50 a pop, it was also a high barrier to even try something and toss it aside if it doesn't work.

Most of the non savvy computer users I know simply stuck to what the OS came with, and perhaps a few packages like Microsoft Office or Quicken. When my mom got an iPhone, she started grabbing apps on her own, just by browsing the integrated store and looking at the top of the charts. This has expanded more to her iPad as well. While she isn't forking over $50 per app, she is part of a growing market segment willing to pay $1 or $2 per app. Economies of scale come into play here to turn this into a thriving market even with the low price mark.

On the games side, the industry is also seeing the massive growth potential for these centralized stores/portals. Steam has helped greatly, as has Facebook and the mobile app markets.

At the end of the day Apple is indeed going to put consumers ahead of developers on their priority list. But I think they have a pretty solid understanding of the importance of developers and the needs to balance it a bit. Sure, they are going to do things that are somewhat hostile on the development side to improve the consumer experience. But honestly, I think thats they way it should be. Place the little bit of pain and hoop hopping where a few developers have to do it, instead of spreading a bit of pain and hoop hopping across the entire customer base.

This is an official Apple package of all the common GCC toolchain bits for OS X. XCode has always installed these alongside the GUI and OS X frameworks. Now people can just download a 200MB package instead of a 2-3GB package. It's not a cross compiling solution.

Cross compiling OS X on Linux has been possible, though it involves bring framework files over from a real OS X box. Not sure about the legality.

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Cross_compiling_OSX_on_Linux covers the work needed for that particular Pascal IDE program. I didn't find it worth the hassle compared to just having a Mac Mini accessible over SSH.

I don't have anything in the App Store at the moment. And I wish Apple didn't take a 30% cut as I think it's still far too great - 15% would sit better with me. However, I'm excited at getting something in there because I know it's going to receive an order of magnitude (at least) more exposure than anything I've ever done myself outside the store. Sell-through also seems to be better as a percentage of viewership, at least according to some devs who have discussed stats.

Right now my sales all come via my web site - and some volume business via email. These visitors come with a roughly 33% split from Google, direct and referrals.

The Mac App store is going to expose my products to millions of people who would never otherwise stumble upon a link to my store/site.

I'll make some comments purely as a consumer. Since the introduction of the Mac App Store, I am extremely reluctant to buy Mac software any other way. This is mostly because I've been burned over the years by developers that upgrade their software to a point they they want more money. Often times, the old version is fine, but they won't provide it for download anymore. And, more than once, I went to buy the updated version at a discount by providing my old license key, and the key isn't recognized buy their checkout system. It's extremely frustrating.

Mac App Store prevents this, and if things follow the iOS App Store customs, updates won't ask me to cough up more money. I also like that applications purchased in the Mac App Store are licensed for use on all my Macs. Not having to keep track of license keys is another bonus.

As for 10.8, I'm not so hot for it since I think Lion is still more finicky than Snow Leopard. Am I the only one that can't drag an item from the dock's Downloads stack straight to the trash bin on the dock? This used to work in 10.7, but now it doesn't. It certainly works in 10.6. There are other annoyances that I can't think of at the moment, but they're enough for me to keep 10.6 on my Mac Mini.

iOSification of Mac OS is mostly a mistake in my eyes. The Launchpad in 10.7 is completely worthless. The newest version of Airport Utility is also worthless to the point I can't believe it's not an april fools joke. Thankfully, you can still get Airport Utility 5.6 which has the old/useful UI, but how long will that last?

I think Mission Control is superior to Exposé, but I don't really see that as taking inspiration from iOS aside from the greater usefulness of multitouch trackpads. As for other multitouch gestures, I immediately turn off about half of them. This includes the "natural" scroll direction.

The many changes to gestures are a pain, but I'm going to grind thru the learning curve.

In my small (IT) world, Apple has succeeded in progressively making itself irrelevant over the past year or so.

They may be all over iEverything, but they have abandoned any consideration of usAnything.

Out of curiosity (and this is more the grander point the developers made when moving to MAS) why didn't you? They had a donate button on their project page for years. I'll admit I was also bad about this, I knew it was there, but never clicked it. But I didn't hesitate to click the buy button. I'm not really sure I can explain my own reasoning, beyond saying it was easier to remember to give them money when they forced it, vs kindly asking every time I clicked download.


I'm curious why you say this, is it tied to the death of the XServer? I'm seeing more Apple stuff at work these days, not less. Started with the iPhone, and is growing to include iPads, and even the occasional Macbook. One of the recent meetings I was in had 7 people with iPads out of 17, with the others using paper notebooks. This is across 3 different companies I've worked for. None have really rolled out any formal integration beyond providing support for mail and VPN, but they are allowing it vs blocking them, and in some cases providing the equipment to those who want it.

Well, I first downloaded Growl on my Powerbook in 2005, probably before they even had a Donate button on the site. I don't know exactly when they added update notifications, but I just started using those to keep up with updates instead of visiting the web site. I'm sure I noticed at some point that they were asking for donations, and I'm not saying I donate to every FOSS project that puts up a button, but I do donate to many, and Growl would have been one of them if they were asking for the donations more prominently.

I am *all* for developers begging loudly for support, and even for choosing to make their apps pay only if they want to, but the fact that the Growl team chose to use the App Store as their only distribution channel was a significant negative for me. If 10.8 wasn't getting its own notification thing, I'd probably have given in at some point, but my policy right now is to always choose the non-MAS purchase option when possible, and if it's not, try to find another app I'm happy with.

It is not like I never had my doubts about Apple's ability to "get" the enterprise. I was waiting for Apple to offer a server product that included redundant power supplies. Didn't happen.

But yes:

- abandoned the xServe line.
- poor ergonomics (for old folks) in the later iMac line.
- dropped Samba from distribution in Lion.
- uber-buggy LDAP support in Lion and patches made it worse.
- quasi-support for NFSv4 that will likely never get out of alpha.

Indeed we see more folks coming into our environment with various Apple iWhatver thingies, but they are all tied to "I". Business processes really depend not on "I" but on roles and in that respect I think Apple ie either clueless or does not care. I am guessing the revenues from iTunes mean the latter is the case.

While my old Power PC XServes lacked a dual supply, the Intel ones did.

A couple of years ago I was convinced I could replace every desktop PC at work with a Mac, nowadays I'm not so sure. In fact, the one area I thought was a no-brainer (video edit) would make me think twice now.

It seems to me Apple have abandoned any interest in the pro market in search of the mighty iDollar.

I've got mixed feelings on this point. Back in the day, before Apple went all revisionist-history on its promises to support ZFS in OS X 10.6, I purchased a beefy Mac Pro for home, on the assumption that it would be the perfect platform for running ZFS. Had I known this was going to be the plan, I instead might have bought some sort of NAS box for my disks, but I figured, hey, why not keep everything in one box. Simplicity!

Then Apple pulled it and hasn't made any serious noises about alternatives.

That Mac Pro is now pushing three years old and at least shows no signs of going belly up. I've had no hardware failures, disk failures, or anything else going particularly wrong. About my only complaint is that wake-on-lan doesn't always work. (But, from my brief exploration of generic PC motherboards, many boards that support ECC memory are really server-class boards, so they don't support hibernation. At least my Mac Pro can go to sleep.)

That's what makes it worth 30% juice. :-) That and the payment processing.

In the enterprise software world, a reseller typically gets 40% margin, and a brick & mortar retailer would expect more. Given how incredibly easily the Apple app stores give developers access to a huge market, I think 30% is not greedy at all. In my opinion, Apple is providing huge value for that 30%. Processing all the financial transactions is probably worth at least a third of that, when you consider the expense you would incur to take credit card transactions for small-dollar purchases.

I dunno. Hosting's cheap, and payment processors like Paypal and Google Checkout don't take anywhere near a 30% vig. Sure, at some point when you get big enough, you'll want to take CC transactions directly, but even then you're nowhere near 30%.

Comparing independent developers to enterprise resellers seems wrong to me. I'll grant that if you're *really* small, it's better to take 70% of a small pie with no overhead, and if you're *really* big, maybe the App Store is a bargain... But it seems to me anyone with monthly sales in the hundreds or maybe low thousands could probably keep more than 90% of their gross by doing it themselves, in which case we're back to how much the App Store is going to increase sales, and, frankly, I don't think the case has been made that it'll make up the difference for the average developer.