Sent From My iPad

MG Siegler:

For most tasks on the iPad, I’m fully touch-ready. In fact, I’m now so used to my iPhone and iPad that I reach up to touch the screen of my MacBook more than I’d care to admit. It’s simply a much more natural interface than using a mouse. You see an area you want to take action on? Touch it.

That’s one reason why the iPad is such a powerful tool with children. It just makes sense. There is basically no learning curve.

This thought leads some skeptics to suggest that maybe the iPad is just that: a children’s toy. It’s not a real computer. But that’s crap. Again, I’m a heavy computer user. And I’m getting comfortable enough with the iPad now that I much prefer to use it in the vast majority of computing situations.

I have found that, especially in the past year, I am doing much more of my computing on the iPad. In fact, it is rare that I take my MacBook Pro along on meetings anymore. The iPad is just that much more portable, and, honestly, it is more than capable for many of my daily tasks.

¶ Day One

On and off over the years I have tried my hand at journaling. It has never stuck. I have several reasons behind why it I have never done well with it.

1. I’ve never really set a clear purpose for journaling, hence motivation to do so wanes quickly.
2. I hate writing by hand, partly because my penmanship is terrible.
3. I never felt motivated to really try journaling via a text file or an app, directly related to reason 1.

Then I read Shawn Blanc’s review of Day One. I had seen Day One in the App Store before, but hadn’t given it much thought, because I never had a clear reason to journal.

Then Shawn wrote this:

As a writer, I believe journaling on a regular basis is critical. It’s writing that will never be judged. It’s writing that doesn’t require an editor. It’s the only place where I am completely free to write for my truly ideal reader: a future me. I have my own inside jokes, my own running story arc, my own shorthand. I love the freedom to write whatever I want, however I want, with no need to make it tidy or clear or concise. And I have no doubt that it makes me a better professional writer.

I realized I had always attempted journaling with the thought that my audience would be someone who would eventually read it. It had never crossed my mind that I could just write for myself and not worry about that writing being judged or analyzed. I could have fun with it.

So I’m giving Day One a shot. I bought the Mac & iOS apps, and after a couple weeks I’m happy to say I have stuck with it.

Being able to attach photos is a nice touch to tie words more vibrantly with memories. I love the automatic tagging of location and weather. Most of all, though, I like brig able to journal from anywhere. I can be at my Mac, or use my iPhone or iPad. iCloud keeps it all in sync.

Most of all, I think I am learning how to approach writing more casually and have more fun with it. Journaling is a new avenue for me, one I like taking a daily stroll down.

You can get Day One for Mac for $5 on the Mac App Store and Day One for iOS for $5 on iTunes.

Pixelmator 2.1 Cherry

I don’t do a great deal of work with images, but when I need something a little more beyond what iPhoto or Aperture can offer, or if I need to make something from scratch, I turn to Pixelmator.

I’ve been using Pixelmator for a few years, and it has always been a better experience than that other pixel-pushing tool from Adobe.

Today, Pixelmator 2.1 Cherry was released, making an already easy to use image editor even easier. It’s ready for both Mountain Lion and the Retina display, includes iCloud document storage support, and features a new effects browser and alignment guides.

Effects always intimidated me because they resided by name only in a menu. I didn’t know what each one did. With the new effects browser I can see what an effect will do before I apply it.

As for alignment guides, this is something I have wanted for a while. Now it is super easy to center or align objects in an image amongst each other. This makes Pixelmator a precision tool.

The Pixelmator team has some great walkthroughs of the new features on their site.

The best part of Pixelmator is the price. It’s just $29.99 $14.99 on the Mac App Store.

¶ A Terrifying, Nightmarish Lesson on Security

Over the past three decades, more and more of our lives have transitioned from analog to digital. First, paper and typewriters yielded to word processors. Next, music went from albums, to cassettes, to CDs, to files on an iPod. Then our photos went from film to JPGs.

It used to be, in the analog, the only ways you’d really lose something is if your home were hit by a natural disaster, or you were burgled.

Not anymore. Mat Honan found this out the hard way. He was hacked. Hard.

At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere. When I set it up, years and years ago, that seemed pretty secure at the time. But it’s not. Especially given that I’ve been using it for, well, years and years. My guess is they used brute force to get the password (see update) and then reset it to do the damage to my devices.

The backup email address on my Gmail account is that same .mac email address. At 4:52 PM, they sent a Gmail password recovery email to the .mac account. Two minutes later, an email arrived notifying me that my Google Account password had changed.

At 5:00 PM, they remote wiped my iPhone

At 5:01 PM, they remote wiped my iPad

At 5:05, they remote wiped my MacBook Air.

[…]

I still can’t get into Gmail. My phone and iPads are down (but are restoring). Apple tells me that the remote wipe is likely irrecoverable without serious forensics. Because I’m a jerk who doesn’t back up data, I’ve lost at more than a year’s worth of photos, emails, documents, and more. And, really, who knows what else.

This is horrifying. A nightmare. As I read Mat’s post this weekend, I could feel a sense of dread creeping on me. I knew I had vulnerabilities to some of my accounts, where I had traded some security for convenience. It’s no excuse. I’m a faithful user of 1Password on all my devices. I have no excuse for not having great passwords.

Except, in this case, not even the strongest password would have helped. The hacker didn’t even try to figure out the password. They had a back door.

From Mat’s follow-up piece on Wired (emphasis mine):

But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

[…]

On Monday, Wired tried to verify the hackers’ access technique by performing it on a different account. We were successful. This means, ultimately, all you need in addition to someone’s e-mail address are those two easily acquired pieces of information: a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card on file.

If you lost your wallet, let’s say it contained your driver’s license, your credit card, and a business card with your iCloud email address. That is all someone would need to destroy your digital life.

Thankfully, Apple and Amazon have, for now, closed the loophole while they tighten security.

Here’s the thing: what happened to Mat has been going on for a while. These loopholes have existed for quite a while. Mat was just the first person to get hit that had a significant audience.

Unfortunately, that’s usually how these things are discovered.

I’d love to see Apple take Marco Arment’s advice on how to make password resets a better:

And ideally, before resetting a password by phone, they’d send a forced “Find My”-style push alert to all registered devices on the account saying something like, “Apple Customer Service has received a request to reset your iCloud password. Please call 1-800-WHATEVER within 24 hours if this is unauthorized.”

Then make the person call back the next day. If you forget your password and the answers to your security questions, it’s not unreasonable to expect a bit of inconvenience.

Marco is right. If you forget how to access your account, a little inconvenience of waiting a day to get back in is okay.

---

I am largely sympathetic to Mat. What he went through sucks. But I can’t get past his one blunder. He didn’t have a backup of his Mac.

How does a technology writer not keep backups? Heck, he uses a Mac. OS X has had backup built-in for 5 years. Here’s a free tip, folks: go learn about Time Machine and then use it.

For even better backup practices, go read Shawn Blanc’s backup tips.

Macworld’s Dan Moren & Lex Friedman have some security tips, as well.

As for me, I’ve disabled Find My Mac on iCloud. The Find service is more practical for devices like the iPhone and iPad, but the idea of someone being able to remote wipe my Mac gives me the willies. I keep backups, but the whole idea just doesn’t sit right with me right now. Anything on my iPhone or iPad already exists on my Mac, so I’m not worried about those devices ever being wiped.

I’ve lost some trust in Apple and Amazon. It was ridiculous how easy Amazon let someone into the account.

And Apple? Well, they deservedly bear the brunt of mistrust. Why? Because they have been asking us to trust them more and more over the years.

I created an Apple ID for the iTunes Store in 2003. Back then, it was only for music. But over the years, it has grown to house music, movies, apps, and now my email, contacts, calendars, notes, reminders, my location, and the keys to wipe my devices.

I’ve realized many of us have a lot of our eggs in one basket. A basket we trust not to tip over.

My advice? Use the basket, but don’t trust it entirely. Keep backups. Use really good passwords (and go buy 1Password for all your devices). And, since 1Password can help you fill in credit card info on a site in a couple clicks, consider not storing credit card info on the web.

Starbucks Signs Up with Square

I am a huge fan of Square. I use it to accept payments. My wife uses it to accept payments. I use their amazing Pay with Square app to buy coffee at my favroite coffee shop.

Even though I have become a bit snobbish about my coffee in the past year, Starbucks helped me to have an interest in the caffeinated beverage. And I still like Starbucks every now and then, because they were integral into kicking off this little area of my life that I take a little pride in. I still like to go and sit at a Starbucks every now and then, and when I am on the road, I know I can get a fairly decent brew there.

Today, Square and Starbucks have teamed up. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square:

It’s amazing to think that Starbucks began as a single coffee shop in Seattle. The concept of taking a good idea and helping it grow is not foreign to them, and Starbucks doesn’t just view Square as the simplest way to accept payments. They see an opportunity to extend and accelerate a model they grew up with: the idea that business is local and that community plays a vital role in job creation and economic vitality. When Starbucks builds the Square Directory into their apps and in-store Digital Network, it gives Square new visibility, driving more customers to opt-in to Square. And with nearly 7,000 Starbucks stores soon accepting Square, these new payers will be able to find your business (including coffeehouses) and pay with their name, building community and creating value.

This is huge and exciting. I think this is going to be a fantastic partnership for both companies, and I hope more people and businesses sign up for Square.

Onward.

Apple’s motivation for suing Samsung

The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple:

Reading the press from the Apple vs Samsung trial lead me to believe that most people don’t understand Apple’s motives for suing Samsung. This lawsuit isn’t about getting compensation for products that were released in 2007 or even 2011, it’s about protecting the products that will be released in 2013 and 2015 and beyond.

iOS 6 Beta 4 Shows Built-In YouTube App the Door

Back in June, I listed a few things I’d like to see Apple remove from iOS. One of those was:

The YouTube app seems slightly irrelevant these days, given that is somewhat out of date with YouTube’s current feature set, and YouTube’s mobile site is more than functional. Heck, let Google roll their own YouTube app onto the App Store.

I just don’t see much advantage to having a built-in YouTube app anymore. And let’s face it, the icon is hideous.

Apple released beta 4 of iOS 6 to developers today, and the built-in YouTube app is gone. The Verge has a statement from Apple:

Our license to include the YouTube app in iOS has ended, customers can use YouTube in the Safari browser and Google is working on a new YouTube app to be on the App Store.

I’m sure there are folks who will be upset. I just see this as a reclaimed spot on the Home Screen.

Touchdown

Back in June I noted the “seven minutes of terror” surrounding NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover. Well, about a half hour ago, those seven minutes have come and gone, and Curiosity has landed safely on Mars.

This is a great day for science, space exploration, and America. It’s also a great day to be a nerd.

CandyBar's Fate

Panic gives an update on CandyBar, their OS X app that helps you easily customize icons for the system, apps, and folders. It’s now free, yet unsupported. It’s also finding a new home over at The Iconfactory.

I remember customizing everything I could to follow a theme. I started trailing off on doing that a little over a year ago and keeping things pretty close to default (not sure why). Maybe that’s a good thing, since customizing is getting harder to do.

¶ OS X Mountain Lion | Review

Intel adopted a development strategy in 2007 called “Tick-Tock”, which essentially consists of a “tick” — a shrinking of process technology of the previous microarchitecture — and a “tock” — a new microarchitecture. One year they do a tick, the next year they do a tock.

For the past 5 years, Apple seems to have adopted the spirit of this strategy, except they tend to move in more a tock-tick fashion — something big, then refinement.

We have seen this strategy in two high-profile areas at Apple:

• iPhone hardware — think iPhone 3G (tock) to iPhone 3GS (tick), iPhone 4 (tock) to iPhone 4S (tick), and
• OS X — Leopard (tock) to Snow Leopard (tick), Lion (tock) to Mountain Lion (tick).

OS X Leopard changed many things in OS X. Snow Leopard followed and didn’t present too many changes visible to the user, but laid groundwork behind the scenes for big changes.

Those big changes came just a year ago in the form of Lion. Lion made the initial leap from the diving board into bringing concepts from iOS to the Mac.

What was promised to be a plunge of perfect form ended up having the slightest of belly flops.

A year later, we have OS X Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion brings many great new features to the table on its own. It could almost be mistaken for a tock-level magnitude of change, but it truly is a tick-level refinement. Where Lion flailed, Mountain Lion is full of grace.

iCloud

When Lion was released one year ago, it did not come with built-in iCloud support — that came in the 10.7.2 update alongside iOS 5 in October. Though I’m sure Apple was designing Lion with iCloud in mind, they left a major component of iCloud out when they added support.

Documents in the Cloud

Documents in the Cloud is Apple’s answer to seamlessly moving files between all your Mac and iOS devices. Unfortunately, this support was pretty much left out of Lion. It was there, but Apple didn’t support it in any of its own apps, and left third-party developers to figure out how to implement it on their own.

Thankfully, Apple has provided a user interface for Documents in the Cloud with Mountain Lion, which they implement in their own apps and third-party developers now have a standard implementation.

iCloud Open/Save Dialog

If you’ve used any of the iWork apps on iOS, the iCloud document chooser should look very familiar. You can create one hierarchy of “folders” by dragging one document on top of another. To remove the folder, simply drag everything back out of it.

You’ll notice in the screenshot above that you can toggle between iCloud and On My Mac. Selecting the latter will switch you to the more familiar Finder-based file system you know and love. Naturally, if you place a file on your Mac, it will not synchronize via iCloud across devices.

One thing that I have noticed about iCloud that is pretty neat is that you can have the same document open on, say, your Mac and iPad. As you type on one, it near-instantly updates on the other. It’s quite something to behold.

But there is a great downside to Documents in the Cloud, in my opinion.

Information Silos

I use Byword as my main text editor. Most of the things I write for this site these days start as a plain-text file in Byword. If I drop that text file into Byword’s iCloud storage, I can only access it from Byword on the Mac, or the Byword iOS app. I can’t, for instance, open that text file in iA Writer or even OS X’s TextEdit.

And speaking of TextEdit, if I saved the text file in its iCloud storage, there would be no way for me access it on an iOS device — only from another Mac running Mountain Lion with my iCloud ID logged in.

Documents stored in iCloud are trapped within a silo. And that silo is the app the file was saved into.

I have an idea for a solution. I hope Apple redesigns Documents in the Cloud to be more like it.

Solution: File-type Document Storage

My proposed solution is to organize files by type. Group all .txt files together, all .pdf files together, etc. Then, allow an app to make a declaration to iCloud telling it which types of files it is able to open. iCloud then displays only those file types to that app.

Under this model, I could save a .txt file to iCloud through TextEdit on my Mac, then open it from Byword or iA Writer on either my Mac, iPhone, or iPad since those apps would declare they are able to open .txt files.

If anything, I think the user-facing aspect of this is even more simple than it is currently. A user would no longer need to remember which app they used to create and store a file. If the app they launch has the ability to open the file, then that file is displayed.

Syncing

iCloud is used for other things than documents, of course. It is the backbone of keeping user data in sync across devices. This facet of iCloud was implemented in Lion quite well. I don’t have any hard evidence, but syncing of things such as contacts and calendars seems much faster and smoother in Mountain Lion.

Consistency

When Lion was announced in October 2010, it was billed as bringing the best of what Apple had learned from iOS back to the Mac. Lion began obfuscating the file system of the Finder slightly with things like Launchpad, which shows all your apps in an iOS-like home screen, and Auto Save, which removes the worry of having to continually hit command-s to save, and it even preserves an untitled document if you close the app, restoring it when you next open the app.

Mountain Lion goes further with bringing consistency between iOS and OS X. We’ve seen some apps get renamed and some new apps appear.

Reminders, Notes, Calendars, Contacts, and Messages

Reminders and Notes have existed in OS X for some time. Reminders was tucked away inside iCal and Notes was in Mail. Now those are separate apps, still named Reminders and Notes, and their interface matches that of their iOS counterparts.

As for iCal and Address Book, they have been renamed to be in line with iOS as well. Now we have Calendars and Contacts. Besides Reminders and Notes being spun off to their own apps, Calendars and Contacts have not changed all that much from Lion, except that they both have sidebars again, as they did in the pre-Lion era.

In Lion, your list of Calendars appeared in a popover and your list of groups in Contacts could only be accessed by flipping a ridiculous page in a skeuomorphic brown book. Both of those have been replaced by sidebars (thankfully). It turns out that form and function can coexist, and all my gripes about these two apps from last year have pretty much been absolved.

iChat has also been renamed, but also drastically changed. It is now Messages, and primarily acts as a Mac-based interface for iMessage. You can still use AOL Instant Messenger, or Bonjour, etc., but they are buried quite a bit. I haven’t really missed the IM aspect, as I enjoy iMessage much more as I can start a conversation on my Mac, then leave and continue it on my iPhone, fairly seamlessly. Messages on the Mac has some bugs, but it is much better than the public beta that was released in February for Lion. iMessage definitely feels like the future of text messaging. I don’t foresee myself using AIM very often going forward.

Oddly enough, with all the renaming for consistency, System Preferences retains its name, instead of becoming Settings, like its iOS counterpart.

Notification Center

Notification Center. Source: Apple.com

Notification Center is another example of the trend of “Back to the Mac” continuing in Mountain Lion. Notification Center was a complete revamp of how notifications worked in iOS 5. Instead of all notifications plastering a modal dialog over whatever you were doing, banners could slide in along the top and slide roll away after a moment. Swiping down front he top of the screen on an iOS device would reveal the Notification Center, where all notifications yet to be acted upon would be collected.

Mountain Lion brings Notification Center to the Mac. All notifications are presented in a consistent manner by swooping into the upper right. If it is an alert (such as a Reminder or Calendar event), it will have Close and Snooze buttons and will stay on the screen until acted upon. If it is just a banner such as for an incoming email, it will remain for a moment, then zip off the right edge of the screen if you don’t act upon it.

To then reveal the Notification center, simply swipe with two finger front he right edge of your trackpad, or, if you are a mouse user, click the new icon that resides in the upper right corner of the menubar.

Notification Center can be accessed at any time from any app. If you don’t want to see notifications for a time, reveal the Notification Center and scroll down a little to reveal a toggle to disable alerts and banners. They will remain disabled until you toggle the switch back, or they will automatically resume the next day.

Another nice feature is if you connect your Mac to a projector and start a presentation, banners and alert will be disabled until you are finished.

Do Not Disturb

Voice Dictation

The iPhone 4S brought Siri, a digital personal assistant which you activate and use with your voice. The retina iPad included Voice Dictation, which is one facet of Siri’s abilities (the retina iPad will be gaining Siri in iOS 6 this fall).

Mountain Lion includes Voice Dictation for any Mac with a microphone, whether that microphone is built-in or external via USB.

You have to opt-in to Voice Dictation via System Preferences, as it captures your voice, then sends it to an Apple server to be processed, which then sends back the text results. It also uploads the contents of Contacts, so it can begin learning names you may say.

The default keyboard shortcut for Voice Dictation is double pressing the function key (fn fn). When you are done speaking, simply click Done or tap fn once more.

You do need to learn a little bit of syntax when using it. It can’t distinguish punctuation by your inflection (maybe someday, right?) so you need to say “comma” to get a , or “question mark” to get ?.

So, let’s have some fun. Here is a little script of what I will tell Voice Dictation to type:

This is a test of voice dictation on oh ess ten period will it succeed or fail question mark I’m hoping it worked exclamation point

So, here is what I expect it to type for me:

This is a test of voice dictation on OS X. Will it succeed or fail? I’m hoping it worked!

And here are the actual results, with no second tries or corrections on my part:

This is a test of voice dictation on OS X. Will it succeed or fail? I’m hoping it worked!

Perfect. And I’m even sitting in a noisy coffee shop with five people chatting at the table next to me and music blaring over the speakers.

Much like how using the Faces feature in iPhoto or Aperture gets better the more it learns a person’s face, Voice Dictation will supposedly learn your voice over time to better interpret any accent you may have and to better distinguish your voice amongst other noise (I’ve been using it a lot, so I’m not really surprised by my results).

Sharing

Since the early days of iOS, we’ve become familiar with the little icon of a rectangle with an arrow leaping from it. That icon is how we share things from one app to another. Tap it in Photos and you can Message a photo, email it, send it to Twitter, and more.

We’ve even seen this icon make an appearance in iPhoto in years past.

Now the Share button is nearly ubiquitous in Mountain Lion. It’s in the Finder, in QuickLook, Safari, Notes, and more. You can even secondary-click on just about any file and see Share in the contextual menu with relevant services listed for that file type. Right click on a picture and you can share to Twitter or Flickr, a video will allow sharing to Vimeo. Just about anything can be shared to Mail, Messages, or AirDrop.

Sharing is Caring

Aside: See? If the Share button can show relevant services based on file type, and hide the irrelevant, then why can’t iCloud do the same with files and apps, as I mentioned earlier?

Social

iOS 5 brought system level Twitter integration, and iOS 6 will bring Facebook integration. In Mountain Lion, Twitter support is baked right in, with Facebook coming concurrently wight he launch of iOS 6.

Notification Center can display banners for your mentions and direct messages. Notification Center also has a Tweet button for you to send a tweet without launching an app (Facebook button will be right alongside it this fall).

You can tweet a picture from just about anywhere. You can share a link from the Share button within Safari.

All in all, I really like the ability to share things quickly straight from OS X without needing to launch a Twitter client or a browser, especially when I am trying to get things done. It allows the ability to share a quick thought without being tempted to spend ten minutes reading tweets from the past couple hours.

AirPlay

AirPlay’s roots are actually found in iTunes on the Mac and the AirPort Express. It used to be called AirTunes and let you send music from iTunes to speakers connected to an AirPort Express.

With iOS 4, AirTunes was renamed to AirPlay, and was expanded to the iPhone and iPad, and allowed not just audio, but video, to an Apple TV. The iPhone 4S and iPad 2 and later can also mirror their screens to an Apple TV.

Mountain Lion brings AirPlay to the Mac (well, some Macs — mid-2011 or later models. Mine doesn’t qualify). I tested AirPlay with my wife’s MacBook Air, and it works quite well. You can mirror your entire screen along with audio to an Apple TV.

If your Mac is too old for AirPlay support, I suggest you check out AirParrot, which should bring AirPlay to your Mac.

Safari

Mountain Lion ships with Safari 6, which sports some refinements, adds some neat features, takes away a feature, and is super fast.

Gone are the separate address and search fields. They have been replaced by the Smart Search Field, which looks and acts much like Google Chrome’s Omnibar. I about did a backflip when I saw this.

There is also a new Tab View. When you have multiple tabs, a new button appears next to the Add Tab button. Clicking it — or, if you have a trackpad, pinching your fingers from wide to close — pulls the tab bar down and apart, and reveals all your tabs as visual pages. You can then swipe between them.

Safari

Safari also has a feature called iCloud Tabs. I haven’t had a use for this yet, as it would require me using another Mac. The idea is that you click this little iCloud button and it shows a list of open tabs on your other Mac. Selecting one will open it on the Mac you are using right now.

iCloud tabs will become much more useful when iOS 6 is released this fall, as it will also include open tabs from your iPhone, iPod, or iPad. I expect I’ll use iCloud tabs heavily after that, as I will love being able to access tabs between all three of my devices.

Reading List in Safari gains Offline mode. When you add something to Reading List, Safari will cache the page so you can view it offline. It’s nice, but it’s no Instapaper replacement, if you ask me.

Safari also tackles privacy by adding Do Not Track in its preferences. Sites like Twitter and Facebook track you while you are logged in. They accomplish this via other sites that include their share and like buttons. Do Not Track is an initiative being adopted by browsers to tell sites that perform such tracking to knock it off. Twitter has openly committed to abiding by Do Not Track if the user turns it on. You can find it in the Privacy section of Safari’s preferences. I highly recommend turning it on.

Safari did remove one major feature — RSS. It’s been removed to such an extent that it has become difficult to detect an RSS feed address to send over to apps like Reeder. Thankfully, Daniel Jalkut made a Safari Extension called Subscribe to Feed that replaces Safari’s ability to detect RSS feeds.

Security

Aside from Do Not Track in Safari, OS X has doubled-down on Security in a big way. There is a new sheriff in town and its name is Gatekeeper. With the Mac App Store, Apple has the ability to revoke the certification of an app should it become nefarious.

However, with apps outside the App Store, Apple has no control.

Until now.

Developers can now obtain (and they should) a Developer ID from Apple. This Developer ID is a digital certificate for a developer to “sign” his or her apps with, thereby signifying that they are known and trusted by Apple.

Gatekeeper has three levels of security:

1. Mac App Store. This setting only allows App Store apps to be installed.
2. Mac App Store and identified developers. This settings allows App Store apps and Developer ID apps to be installed.
3. Anywhere. This is the setting we have always known on the Mac, allowing apps from anywhere and from anyone to be installed.

The default setting is the middle of the road (hence why developers should obtain a Developer ID).

This is a huge benefit for users. If they download an app that is Gatekeeper compliant, it installs without a problem. Should the developer of that app go rogue and ship an update to turn it into malware, Apple can revoke that developer’s ID and the app is dead in its tracks.

With Developer ID being the default setting, this should curtail any future malware attacks significantly.

Some think this is just the first step of Apple locking down the Mac to an App Store only model like iOS. I don’t think that is the case. If it were, I don’t think they would have devoted the time to creating Developer ID. They would have just done it. That is Apple’s style, after all.

Apps outside the App Store have a bright future, in my opinion. And a little extra security is a good thing.

Mac App Store

In Lion, system updates came from Software Update and the App Store only showed updates for apps purchased via the store.

In Mountain lion, the App Store handles both app updates and system updates. The screenshot below shows updates that normally would have been Software Update (I unfortunately didn’t have any App Store app updates at the time).

App Store Updates

Notification Center will also let you know when updates are available via the App Store.

Minutiae

You can rename a document while it is open from the title bar. Just hover the cursor near the title at the top of a document and click the little triangle that appears to the right. Select Rename… and you can edit the name right there. This is one of my favorite little features Mountain Lion.

Save As… was excised in favor of Duplicate in Lion. Now Save As… is back. From the File menu, hold down the option key and Duplicate will change into Save As…, also revealing its keyboard shortcut of option-shift-command-s. I never got the hang of Duplicate, so I am very glad to have Save As… back.

Lion introduced a natural language way of adding a new calendar event by clicking the + button in the upper left of Calendars. I always found it tedious to type all that out instead of just filling out the little popover form for a new event. With Mountain Lion’s Voice Dictation, I click that +, tap fn fn and speak the natural language of my event details. Works like a charm.

The Finder shows a little progress bar on a file’s icon when copying it to/from a server or connected drive. You can also rearrange the sections of the Finder’s sidebar now.

QuickLook used to work only by clicking a QuickLook button in the Finder or tapping the spacebar after selecting a file. Now you can simply do a three-finger tap on the trackpad to QuickLook a file.

A three-finger tap on a word will bring up a Dictionary popover for that word (in Lion it was a three-finger double tap — simplification).

Launchpad now has search. While in Launchpad, just start typing the name of an app to narrow things down.

Mail has a new feature called VIP. Click the star next to a sender’s name to make them a VIP. Mail automatically collects all messages from that sender into a VIP inbox. If you have multiple addresses for that sender in Contacts, Mail grabs messages sent from those addresses as well.

Messages can send files via iMessage up to 100MB. That’s nice.

Notes supports photos and attachments, rich text, links, and bulleted and numbered lists. Notes can also organize notes into folders. I imagine all this will come to iOS 6.

Photo Booth can set your Twitter profile picture.

Oldie-but-a-goodie: This was actually in Lion, but it deserves mentioning again. You can sign your name on a piece of paper, then, using Preview, hold it up to the FaceTime camera on your Mac, and capture it for use on forms.

Scroll bars in Mountain Lion expand when you hover the cursor over them, so it’s easier to scroll a web page or document.

You can now backup to multiple drives using Time Machine, for extra backup goodness.

Buying Advice

OS X Mountain Lion is just $20 from the Mac App Store. Unlike last year with Lion, you will not be able to buy it on a USB stick.

Here’s some really good news: if for some reason you skipped OS X Lion and you are still on Snow Leopard, you can pass Go and collect $200 go straight to Mountain Lion for the same $20.

Mountain Lion is a no brainer. Usually the initial release of a major version of OS X is pretty buggy. Mountain Lion is the most stable version of OS X I’ve ever installed. It’s better than Lion’s latest release of 10.7.4.

Mountain Lion is a great update and you should get it. Period.

Side Note: You should probably also consider ditching the mouse (if you haven’t already) and investing in a Magic Trackpad. OS X is becoming increasingly gesture-based. Even the gesture-enabled Magic Mouse is limited. The Mac these days is made for trackpads. You should get on board.

You can watch videos of OS X Mountain Lion’s main features here or look over the 200+ features here.