The delay itself has been greeted with mostly positive reactions from developers, who are thankful for the additional time to adapt to this new approach even if they are still anxious about the long-term implications. Chris Foresman wrote a great summary of sandboxing, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software covered some of the issues that face developers of Mac software, and Manton Reece, developer of Clipstart, explained why he is dropping out of the Mac App Store to avoid sandboxing entirely. Most discussion of sandboxing has focused on the security implications of the new approach. However, I think that Apple may be playing a long game here that goes far beyond incremental improvements to the security of OS X.

Sandboxing: Security is not the end game

I don’t mean to imply that security is not an important consideration. It is. The problem is that sandboxing is only partially effective as a technique to improve security simply because outright malicious software won’t use it anyway. Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster wrote an excellent essay on the limitations of sandboxing as a security measure. Gatekeeper is likely to be s more effective security measure. So if sandboxing is not the last word on the future security of the Mac platform, what else might be going on?

What use could there be for a shift in programming conventions that requires apps to assume that all their files and settings are held in their own isolated container? That requires developers to carefully document when, where and why they need to reach out of their sandbox. That puts the OS in charge of allowing apps to access shared resources instead of unfettered access to the whole filesystem. What use is there in breaking long-held traditions of using arbitrary file access to enable shared settings? Why remove the ability to talk to other apps through Apple events?

It is not a far stretch to consider that this shift in approach might have a connection to Apple’s long-term plans to make iCloud the center of their strategy for the next decade. Apple intends for developers to move away from reliance on direct access to all of the nooks and crannies of the local filesystem on the computer and instead package up their files using the container approach. Self-contained sandboxes are more easily copied and moved between machines and are easier to back up. More and more, applications interact with online services across multiple devices. If your digital “stuff” is strewn about the cloud and across a couple of Macs (work, home, desktop, laptop) as well as multiple mobile devices like your iPhone and iPad, a dotfile on your computer might not be the best place to store settings anyway. Sandboxing could be a step towards abstracting away the local filesystem in favor of cloud-based storage.

The long game of sandboxing

While we don’t have answers now, there are a few areas to pay close attention to over the coming months as Mountain Lion moves closer to release and iOS is updated as expected later this year. (WWDC this summer will be interesting.)

The first feature to watch is entitlements, which are the list of permitted actions apps are allowed to perform from within the sandbox. Apple has expanded them a bit in Lion 10.7.3, but developers would like more. Daniel Jalkut thinks it is urgent that Apple address the current scope of entitlements. “The number one broken thing about sandboxing as it stands today, is the list of entitlements is simply too limited.” Further refinement of the available entitlements is likely, but it will be more interesting to watch where Apple expands the access granted to sandboxed apps. Will there be more direct access to places in the filesystem? More access to hardware features like serial ports? Or just more refinement to the iCloud APIs? Entitlements will be a clear indication of Apple loosening up on app restrictions or sticking to their guns.

The second area to watch is to see what Apple will do to explain sandboxing to users. If this is truly a security-focused measure, I would expect to see more prompts in OS X about what applications are asking to do (or which entitlements they have requested). If sandboxing isn’t meant to keep users better informed on what apps can and can’t do, then I would suspect that sandboxing is more about corralling developers to interact with the system in ways that can be abstracted or redirected to iCloud.

The big question in my mind, is what will be done with inter-process communication? URL schemes, as we have in iOS, are certainly much more limited than Apple events, even with call-backs. However, URL schemes also provide an abstraction where they could be made to work in different contexts, such as on a computer, on an iPhone or in a web app. Surely, something else is coming to meet the need for automation, workflow scripting and sharing between apps if the Apple events system is being phased out. This will be a key area to watch over the next few months to see where the wind blows out of Cupertino.

I can’t shake the feeling that sandboxing is part of a much bigger play by Apple and that it connects to their strategy for iCloud. While all we can do at the moment is speculate, I feel certain that developers that can suss out the larger meaning here and see a few steps ahead of the rest of us have a real opportunity. We saw companies that pulled ahead of the pack with the first generation of mobile, connected, and social apps for the App Store. There is a similar opportunity here with sandboxing and iCloud to try and skate to where Apple is looking to send the puck, to borrow a phrase from Wayne Gretzky, instead of simply complaining that the puck is not where it’s been.

Tea leaves thumbnail used courtesy of Flickr user xJason.Rogersx

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The major new features in OS X Mountain Lion are what everyone is talking about, but with every release of OS X, Apple makes some smaller changes that escape the notice of most. We’re going to take a look at some of those changes, starting with more general ones dealing with look and feel, up to some new features in apps like Mail and Safari.

General

• When you move a large file in the Finder, the file icon reflects the progress, just like when you install an app on iOS. The default progress dialog also opens, but I imagine it’ll be gone in later builds of Mountain Lion.
• The iOS-like scrollbars in Lion are pretty thin, and they stay thin when you hover over them, making them harder to target with the cursor. In Mountain Lion, scrollbars are noticeably wider, so they’re easier to hit.
• In Lion, grid-view Stacks still used the scrollbars from Snow Leopard, which is odd given that every other scrollbar has been iOS-ified. Not any more — in Mountain Lion they’ve been replaced by darker iOS-like scrollbars.
• Last, there are some changes to System Preferences. There are new slide-show-style screen savers in the Desktop & Screen Saver pane, similar to the ones for Apple TV. The Universal Access preference pane has a cleaner interface, and it’s been renamed “Accessibility” and moved from the Personal section to the System section.

Versions

• When you begin editing a document that’s just been saved, the “Edited” status in the toolbar will flash blue three times, to make sure you know.
• When duplicating a document, it lets you change the name right in the title bar, instead of just creating a new document with “copy” at the end of the name. You can also just hit Cmd-Shift-S to duplicate, so you don’t need to map that shortcut in System Preferences.
• In the Versions drop-down menu, there’s a new “Move To” option, so you can move the current file around on your Mac, or to iCloud.

Launchpad & Dashboard

• Launchpad has a new search bar at the top, which lets you filter through applications just by typing. You can key through them and press enter to launch them.
• Dashboard has a new interface for adding widgets, and it works exactly like Launchpad. It even has folders, for those hyper-organized Dashboard users (if they exist).

Safari

• Safari has a bunch of small refinements that make it easier to use. First, there’s a unified search bar and address bar, à la Chrome’s Omnibox. URLs are grayed out after the domain name, and the “http://” is stripped out as well.
• Tabs scale proportionally now, so if you have two tabs open, they’ll each take up half of the tab bar instead of a fixed width like before. This actually isn’t entirely new, as the Safari 4 beta did the same thing, though Apple axed the behavior before final release.

Mail

• You can now designate contacts as VIPs, so their emails will show up in a separate mailbox in the sidebar. Inline find is another new edition to Mail, and it works much the same as it does in Safari, with the addition of find and replace when composing a new email.
• The new Mail lacks RSS support, which has also been taken from Safari. It seems Apple doesn’t see the point in keeping that feature around.

Preview

• Preview has a simplified toolbar, with View, Zoom and Share on the left, and Crop, Rotate and Edit on the right. The Edit button opens a toolbar where all of Preview’s other tools reside, similar to the Edit button in the iOS Photos app.

Calendar and Contacts

• There are some pretty minor changes to Calendar and Contacts. In Calendar, the calendar’s drop-down menu is gone, replaced by a slide-out sidebar instead. Also, the faux-stitching has been removed from the toolbar. Also, the search box now supports search tokens, like in Mail.
• In Contacts, the red bookmark used to access groups is gone. Instead, there are three different views.

It’s clear that Mountain Lion is all about simplifying OS X: getting rid of things that don’t work, and refining things that do.

What else do you think Apple should change before Mountain Lion is released this summer?

Header image via Flicker user sigsegv.

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There are two ways to think about securing information: Enabling access to information that you want to keep, and disabling access to information you no longer want to keep.  In this post, we will focus on the information Mac users no longer want to keep.  If you are thinking that this is as easy as moving a file to the trash, then emptying the trash, think again.  There are numerous data recovery utilities on the market that can recover lost or deleted files.  And these utilities work because most of us do not know how to securely erase information off of our Macs.  The following are some tips on how you can at least make if very difficult for others to recover your unwanted files.

Finder’s Secure Empty Trash

When you just empty the trash on a Mac, OS X no longer keeps track of where the data associated with the file is stored on the hard drive.  The data is still there, it’s just that the Finder can no longer find it.  As you continue to work and OS X saves new files on your hard drive, OS X could write over parts of your deleted files data with the new files data.  What many data recovery utilities take advantage of is the chance that old data is still there, and has not yet been written over by new data.  When you instead elect to use Secure Empty Trash, OS X does in fact ensure that the old data is written over with new data, which will ensure that the old data is no longer there — think of it like scribbling out a written message on a post-it note.  What is not known for sure is how many times Secure Empty Trash writes over the old file’s data.

The U.S. Department of Defense data erasure guidelines require that erased data be written over no less than seven times.  Why seven times?  It just so happens that because of the way hard drives work, there is an opportunity for parts of the data to remain on the physical disk.  There is a mechanical arm that reaches out across the hard drive to read and write data off of a magnetic platter.  That mechanical arm may not pass over exactly the same spot on the hard drive with each pass.  If you remove the platter from the drive, you can actually scan the surface of the drive using a much more precise mechanical arm to read old data off of the drive.  Writing over the data seven times compensates for this opportunity.  Think of it like plowing a field: The more times you plow over the earth, the less likely you are to see last season’s crop lines.

Permanent Erasure Utility

There are utilities that you can use that take this even further.  Available in the Mac App Store is a free utility from Edenwaith called Permanent Eraser.  Tools like Permanent Erasure give the user greater control over how the old data is written over with new data when you empty the trash.  For instance, Peter Gutmann, a computer scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, had devised a method of overwriting data 35 times, each pass utilizing a different pattern of ones and zeroes.  Permanent Erasure is configurable to take advantage of Gutmann’s research and can apply his technique of writing over old data when the trash is emptied.  In fact, Permanent Erasure goes even further by also scrambling the original file name and truncating the file size to nothing before finally unlinking it from the system.

Gutmann’s technique is quite dated, as it was originally applied to a variety of consumer grade hard drives available back in the late 1990s.  While widely considered the most secure means of erasing data off of an old hard drive that you still intend to use, some have speculated that this technique is no longer entirely necessary on modern-day, high-density and large-volume SATA drives.  Some security forums online have speculated that a single pass of random ones and zeroes is sufficient on modern equipment.  Even though there are tools that make utilizing even the most secure of techniques easy, you do wear down the drive and decrease its lifespan by overemploying this technique on a daily basis.  It is probably best to utilize the Finder’s Secure Erase on a daily basis, and use tools like Permanent Erasure when you have recently deleted something important that you want to make absolutely sure no one will be able to access again.

Time Machine Backups

Lets not forget about Time Machine and other backup solutions you may have implemented.  Going to extremes to erase a file from a hard drive that you routinely back up could be seen as a fool’s errand if you neglect to erase all of the backup copies as well.  But there is a way to delete all backed up versions of a file from within Time Machine.  Before you delete the file you want to remove permanently, open Time Machine and click on the gears to expose a menu.  From the menu select “Delete all backups of this file.” This will remove all references in Time Machine showing that the file ever existed.

This feature of Time Machine will not implement the same technique as Secure Empty Trash or any more advanced utilities like Permanent Erasure by writing over the data on the drive that the original file occupied.  It just so happens that a halfway decent automated backup strategy could end up being the Achilles’ heel of a halfway decent security strategy.  Once you backup your files online for instance, you may not have any way to delete individual files from all of the redundant backups that your cloud-based service provider has elected to employ.  The data is still out there, somewhere.

Disk Utility’s Secure Erase Options

Looking at this problem from an individual file perspective is good if you intend to keep using all of the old hard drives you have ever owned.  But what if you want to sell or give away your old equipment to somebody else?  At such a time it is a good idea to securely erase an entire drive’s data.  Fortunately Mac OS X’s Drive Utility has you covered.  Just open Disk Utility and select the drive you want to erase.  Choose the selector labeled “Erase” and click on the “Security Options” button.  Here you will find a range of options from “Fastest” to “Most Secure.”

Unfortunately, Disk Utility stops short at just a seven pass overwrite and does not employ any other technique of securely erasing an entire drive.  And since OS X 10. 7 Lion, you no longer have the option to boot from DVD in order to gain access to Disk Utility in order to wipe the internal hard drive of your Mac clean.

One of the most widely used and highly recommended tools to use in cases like this, Darik’s Boot And Nuke (DBAN), can be accessed from a bootable CD/DVD on your Mac.  You can also create a customized USB drive that will boot to Ubuntu where you can install and use the terminal command “wipe“ (there is also a GUI interface for “wipe called Parted Magic).  Your best bet is to stick with something like Micromat’s TechTool Pro Wipe Disk feature, which will also boot from DVD or USB.  Any one of these three tools will wipe the internal drive of your Mac completely clean.

Hardware-Based Accessories

You can always try booting your MacBook in target disk mode in order connect to the hard drive externally and securely wipe the internal hard drive.  However, wiping a drive clean may be difficult if the Mac that the drive is in no longer boots up.  There are two hardware accessories for sale at MacSales by NewerTech that can come in handy once you have decided to remove the hard drive from your old Mac.  If you only need to do this on a rare occasion, consider the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Universal Drive Adapter.  It supports both IDE and SATA formats for 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives.  If you are looking for a more permanent SATA solution, one that you can connect to via eSATA, then get the NewerTech Voyager hard drive dock.

If you happen to do this a lot, or if you are the go-to person when it comes to IT issues, you may consider investing in a hardware-based wipe solution to securely erase all of the hard drives you have to work with.  WiebeTech’s Drive eRaser Ultra will wipe your IDE and SATA drives clean and won’t lock up your Mac in the process as it is a standalone wipe accessory.

Physical Destruction

There are ways to render a hard drive completely useless to others through the means of bashing, grinding, shredding, incinerating and even exposing the raw elements of the drive to a phase transition by vaporizing all of its components.  Rather than try to handle this yourself by purchasing your own Model 22 HDD Hard Drive Disintegrator, there are services that will take care of this for you.

But even professional disintegration services recommend that you first perform your own due diligence by securely wiping off any private information before submitting the equipment to them for disposal.  One thing to look for when shopping around for such a service is to see if they are NAID Certified, if they offer an audit trail of the destruction process and will issue some sort of certificate of destruction.

Solid State Drives

This is all well and good provided you only have a traditional IDE or SATA hard drive that uses mechanical arms to read and write data off of rotating platters.  But what if you have a solid state drive (SSD), what then?  SSDs utilize a completely different technology that renders many of the above techniques ineffective.  The Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory of the University of California San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering department has commenced a study to look at the effectiveness of various sanitizing techniques on SSDs. What researchers found was that a new approach to securely wiping a drive is needed.

The SSD’s wear-leveling technology, while designed to prolong the lifespan of the drive, makes it almost impossible to guarantee that a given file has been overwritten.  The implementation of many SSDs’ buffering technology, which was designed to help compensate for memory failures, also challenges many of the established erasure techniques.  The only recourse then is to always use full disk encryption on SSDs.  SSDs store the encryption keys in a Key Storage Area (KSA).  This KSA can be cleared to make the data that remains on the drive practically impossible to recover.  Some newer SSDs provide an “erase unit” command, but this has not been implemented uniformly across all drives and is not exposed in popular drive utility tools currently available to consumers.

When thinking about both your security as well as your backup strategy, think also of the reverse side of the equation — not just how can you continue to securely access your most private information, but also how can you prevent access to your private information by wiping it clean off of any device it has been stored on when you no longer want that device.  Paying attention to someone can access your files stored on old discarded computer equipment is key to any good security strategy.

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iCloud support is significant because it potentially reduces the IT infrastructure needed for shared document storage and backup of documents and device settings. Students will be able to share documents created on the iPad with a Mac, or even share back and forth. There are a few caveats, of course. You’ll need software for both platforms that can work with the same document. The iWork bundle is an example of software that can work on the same documents on both iPad and Mac. This could be great for situations where students have iPads but might need to hop on a computer to quickly paste in an image or chart created on the Mac. The downside to all this is that Apple didn’t really design iCloud for a shared computing environment like a school, so you’ll have to figure out how to allow access in your Mac lab. If we’re lucky, there might be something like the old iDisk where you could temporarily access a user’s documents, but I’ll assume that each student will need their own user account on the Mac to make the integration work. It could be great for a Bring Your Own Device program where students can bring their own iPad and Macs are available in the school lab.

Gatekeeper is a new feature of OS X Mountain Lion that gives users more control over running only software downloaded from the Apple-run Mac App Store, software that has been signed by a registered developer (so you know the source), or any software at all. Gatekeeper sounds like it could be good for schools because it provides some restrictions against running untrusted software, but I suspect that most will continue to lock down apps by only allowing approved software from a centrally managed white list. Still, I like the possibility of a middle ground where non-IT folks could install the software they need for a class, or even just a certain unit for a few weeks, as long as it is from the App Store or signed by a registered developer. It would certainly help teachers avoid malware, but it doesn’t do much on its own to prevent kids from installing time wasters and games. You’ll still need to use admin accounts, permissions and profile manager or some other tool for that.

Notes looks like it could be a great research tool and organizer for students working on a project. I like the idea of students collecting notes on their iPad and then pulling them together to write a paper or a presentation on the Mac. Of course, I’m still hoping that iCloud syncing of notes will be workable in schools. Reminders, a simple to-do list for both iOS and OS X, seems to fit right in with Notes and could definitely be useful, but only when integrated with iCloud syncing so students can make notes to themselves when working in the Mac lab and then pick up those notes and reminders on their iPad later.

Share Sheets, Twitter, Notifications, Messages and Game Center are probably not on the top of the list for pedagogically sound uses of Macs in school, but I’m sure some creative teacher will surprise me. I suspect that most schools will be fighting with their IT departments to even allow network access to Twitter, let alone allow the students to access those features on the desktop. Messages, the new version of the iChat instant messaging application, could be a nightmare in some situations, especially since it allows for sending messages to iPhones, much like texting from the computer to a friend with an iPhone. Just one more thing to watch out for, I guess.

Which brings us to the end of line with AirPlay Mirroring. Sweet, sweet AirPlay. AirPlay Mirroring allows you to display your screen to an Apple TV hooked up to a projector or a big TV in the classroom. Airplay Mirroring is going to be great for schools that are deploying an iPad 1-to-1 program. Not because we don’t have ways to hook up computers and iPads to TVs and projectors now, but because there will be a uniform method to do so that works across iOS devices and Mac computers that doesn’t require a variety of easily lost or misplaced adapters and cables. It also helps that this uniform method is wireless and relies only on a $99 Apple TV being installed in the classroom. I think teachers will be thrilled with the options available to share their desktop with the projector, switch to their iPad so they can walk around the room and still show their notes on the screen, and then let a student put their work up on the screen — all without plugging in a single cable or wasting time trying to find the adapter that was supposed to be returned to the projector cart or their desk drawer.

None of the above-features are going to revolutionize education or create a surge in demand for Macs, but I do think that it will help tremendously in schools where iPads are being adopted. OS X Mountain Lion pulls together iOS and the Mac in a way that will make it easier for teachers and students to go back and forth with iCloud syncing (as long as you work out the policies and procedures to do that effectively), and AirPlay makes it dead simple to make use of projectors and big TV screens as well.

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Now with OS X Mountain Lion, which should arrive some time this summer, true feature parity for Notes, Reminders and Notifications comes to OS X. I’ve spent some time with the new features, and I’m eager to share my experiences with you.

Notes

Notes syncing from iOS back to OS X has always struck me as a tacked-on feature, with notes buried in Mail.app, making viewing and editing notes awkward and unpleasant. With Mountain Lion, notes get their rightful position in their own app. The Mountain Lion version is a near-duplicate of the iOS version, and I do not view that as a criticism, because Notes on iOS is very elegant in its simplicity.

What I found interesting is while Notes can be turned on and off via the iCloud System Preference, it apparently still uses IMAP for some of the backend transfer as I was asked to enter in my passwords for my Gmail accounts. Notes appear to sync quickly, within a minute or so of being edited.

I’m really excited about Notes being easier to use in OS X. I swap between Evernote and Notes for my note-taking needs, with Evernote getting my article-length notes clipped from the web or imported PDFs, and Notes getting my day-to-day notes, like what printer my Mom has, dial-in codes for meetings, meeting notes, etc.

Reminders

Reminders, formerly To-Dos, made a lot of sense living in iCal pre-iOS. However, the Calendar iOS app never had to-dos, and with the advent of the Reminders iOS app, it became very uncomfortable having them stored in iCal. I always found iCal’s handling of to-dos unwieldy, and being stuck in a small pane off to the side didn’t help. It’s been said that the areas of OS X and iOS that are the most polished are the ones Steve Jobs was very involved in — if so, I’m fairly confident the man never managed a task list in iCal.

Now with Mountain Lion, to-dos are moved to their own Reminders app, and life couldn’t be better. It’s a nearly identical copy of the iOS app in looks and function, with two big differences: on OS X you can choose if a list is on iCloud or your Mac, and I cannot see a way to set a location-based reminder. While OS X isn’t really location aware (even though it does have Find my Mac), it would be nice if I could set a reminder in OS X for something I need to do at work and have my iPhone remind me when I get there.

Overall, I’m happy with Reminders in Mountain Lion as it allows me to easily manage my to-dos. While I still expect to handle most of my project-level task management in OmniFocus, Reminders will be the app I use to remind me of life’s daily minutiae.

Notifications

The last of what I call the Big Three features to migrate from iOS to OS X is Notifications. Users of Growl will find Notifications very similar as notifications are displayed in the upper right-hand corner. As with iOS, you can choose if an app displays a banner, an alert that shows up in the middle of the screen, a badge icon, or all three.

Right now, obviously, only the apps built into Mountain Lion are supported. According to this piece by John Gruber, only apps acquired from the Mac App Store can send events to Notifications. As an aside, you can configure Mail.app to only alert you if you receive an e-mail from someone you have flagged as a VIP, which helps cut down on the popup clutter.

So far my experiences with Notifications have been light, with not many apps supporting it. I’m not sure if Notifications will ever fully replace Growl for me since not all the apps I rely on Growl for are available in the Mac App Store.

Final thoughts

Apple’s headline on the Mountain Lion web page is “Inspired by iPad. Re-imagined for Mac,” and that’s pretty much true based on my usage of it so far. I’m happy there is feature parity between iOS and OS X for Notes and Reminders. If you don’t complement your Macintosh with an iOS device, you may not derive the same excitement I do from these new features. But if you’re a  heavy user of Notes and Reminders you will be thrilled that these apps are now on OS X.

One hope I have, with OS X moving to a yearly upgrade cycle, as iOS has always had, is that features that complement each other on both operating systems will be released at the same time, and not with the lag we currently have.

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When Snow Leopard came out two years after Leopard, it provided a lot of UI refinements and some important under-the-hood upgrades for developers, like full 64-bit support, Blocks in Objective-C, Grand Central Dispatch, QuickTime X, OpenCL, native Exchange support and more. Mountain Lion is a similar upgrade — it looks to improve on Lion with a lot of UI refinements and some significant changes for developers. But instead of under-the-hood improvements, the most significant changes appear to be out in the cloud this time around.

Here’s the list of changes that Apple is rolling out, and how they will affect developers:

iCloud

iCloud can store both documents and key-value pairs. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the developer is responsible for collisions and conflict resolution between different devices updating the cloud. Documents have a dialog to let users select which version of a file they want to use. If you need to merge document changes, you’re on your own. Developers will need to think really carefully about how to manage conflicts when saving to iCloud if you are syncing data between multiple devices/computers. It’s not clear yet if apps signed by the Mac developer program certs can access data stored by apps signed by the iOS developer program certs. We will have to wait and see what Apple intends here.

While Snow Leopard added Exchange, and Lion added iOS-like features, I think Mountain Lion will be remembered as the “iCloudification” of the Mac.

Game Center

Something like 25 percent of titles in the Mac App Store are games, and the percentage is also quite high on iOS. I think there is a major opportunity here for developers to port games from iOS and keep high scores, achievements and friend lists in sync. iCloud support also means keeping saved games and game states in sync across devices. I’m not sure Game Center will ever be as popular with gamers as Steam and Xbox Live, but it could be great for casual gaming. I’d love to see someone come up with Xcode achievements so I could compare KLOCs with my friends.

Developer IDs, App Signing, Gatekeeper & Sandboxing

A lot has been written about sandboxing, which is coming to the Mac App Store and Lion, in advance of Mountain Lion’s release. I don’t think I’ll try to add anything to the discussion except to point out that Gatekeeper should help to educate users on what the differences are. It appears that you’ll be able to sign your apps — and gain the increased trust of users — without having to submit to the App Store and agree to sandboxing. Of course, to use the iCloud features and other goodies like notifications, you’ll probably want to go with the App Store anyway. Overall, I think this will end up being a good thing, despite the growing pains endured during the rollout.

Ken Case of The Omni Group is optimistic about the announcements:

This seems like a very big deal to me. Partly because Gatekeeper takes a more proactive stance against malware, preventing malware developers from producing new software which infects systems rather than always retroactively tracking down the bad software and preventing it from spreading further.

But even more important to me is that while designing this feature in a post-Mac App Store world, Apple went out of their way to build a mechanism which still supports developers who distribute software through channels other than the Mac App Store. It would have been much easier for them to simply say “to get malware protection, you must use the Mac App Store; otherwise any software you use is at your own risk” — but instead they’ve introduced a new mechanism for identifying trusted developers who distribute software outside the Mac App Store’s curated experience.

Color me relieved!

Sharing

Integrating single sign-on for Twitter in iOS led to a marked increase in people signing up for Twitter accounts. Just as Twitter integration didn’t kill the sales of dedicated Twitter clients on iOS, I would expect that the market on OS X won’t be affected much. Of course, Twitter isn’t the only way to share things. Flickr, Vimeo, etc. are there as well. What I’m really curious to see is if developers will be allowed to extend the sharing sheet by registering their own apps on the system. That could be awesome.

Apple is trying to make it easy to add sharing to an app, but the real issue here is figuring out if your app needs Twitter integration or not. I’m not sure I need to tweet my word count from within BBEdit, for example, but I do like the idea of tweeting what I’m reading right from within Safari, or what I’m looking at from within iTunes or the Mac App Store. I’m hopeful about this feature, as long as developers are judicious in putting it to good use.

Notifications

I think this is one area that developers should really work to adopt. I’m curious to find out more if Apple will allow online services to send notifications to apps as you can on iOS (where Facebook sends a notification to the Facebook app, and Strategery tells you when you’ve been defeated, etc.). Because of the infrastructure needed to handle those types of notices (especially at Internet scale), I would look into Push IO and similar services to leverage so you don’t have to build it all on your own.

What Else?

I’m sure there will be much more to come as Apple makes their plans more public closer to the summer launch, but I think there is a lot of good stuff here that developers can use to improve and build on their Mac apps. I think that iCloud integration will have the biggest long-term impact on OS X, but the refinements in app signing, sharing and notifications will be important features for developers as well.

What do you think will be the biggest change to the ways you make Mac software today?

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On the surface, the functionality is roughly the same as previous versions of iChat. It supports text instant messaging with one person or in a group “conference room” and video chat with up to three other people. You can still enter multiple accounts from different services like AIM, Google Talk and other Jabber-based accounts. What’s new is that you can now connect your Mac to the same iMessage account that you use on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. When setting up an iMessage account, you can choose to use your email address, and you can optionally attach your phone number during setup.

Messages walks you through a quick setup when first launched and reveals a somewhat familiar window layout, with conversations listed on the left and the chat pane on the right. The “Buddies” window is still available to show which of your friends are online and available to chat. One thing that might look different is a Mail-like address bar labeled “To:” at the top of a new conversation, where you can just start typing the name of the recipient. It will find all the matches in your address book and present the various choices of phone numbers, email addresses and accounts associated with different chat services for that name. This is particularly important when using the iMessage service, where email might be associated with the Mac and the phone number might be associated with an iPhone.

The iMessage service supports “delivered” notifications just like on iOS, and optional “read” notifications to be returned to the sender after you’ve viewed their message. These settings are controlled in the app preferences, where you will also find general preferences, account setup, message settings, alert styles and audio/video settings.

When you launch a video chat with someone using Facetime, it actually launches the Facetime application on your Mac. AIM video chat is still available in the Messages application itself.

When I tried Messages out this morning, replies to an iMessage chat showed up in Messages on my Mac, but also appeared as notifications on my iPhone sitting next to me on the desk. I could switch back and forth between the two devices and continue the conversation on either one. The entire conversation was visible on both my Mac and my iPhone and the entire experience was completely seamless.

Conclusions

The importance of this seamless transition between devices for me is the ability to keep the context of the entire conversation in front of me, no matter where I chose to pick up and continue with my next reply. I might get some iMessage “texts” on my iPhone, but when I get back to the office, I can open my laptop and continue right where I left off.

It happens fairly often that clients (or my wife and kids) will text me about something that I need to look up on the computer to answer. As long as they are on iMessage, I can see the original question on my Mac and easily reply from there.

One nice detail is that the repeat notifications on the iPhone are muted when you read the message on your Mac. I left my iPhone untouched beside me while chatting with a friend on my Mac. I saw that the repeat notification that I usually get for text messages never showed up. This is great as long as the iMessage service knows that I read the reply in Messages for Mac. When I turned off Messages for Mac, the continued conversation now triggered repeat notifications on my iPhone.

The area that might require a little more polishing is that, when the message is unread on the Mac, it still appears to mute the repeat notification on the phone. If you left your Mac running unattended, you might not get repeat notifications of new messages on your iPhone. Obviously, this feature doesn’t affect everyone as some people might disable repeat notifications, but it does point out the necessity of being careful about working with betas and figuring out how things work, and what might change over time as Apple refines the Messages application.

Overall, I am pretty positive about the new features. I think Messages for Mac will actually be a big help in my professional and personal life and will make text/IM even more convenient. As for the big picture, I think the overall theme of Mountain Lion (including this beta of Messages for Mac on Lion) is not so much that iOS features and apps are coming to the Mac, but that the apps will work across both iOS and Mac in a completely seamless experience.

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Mac developers will get the first chance to sink their teeth into the developer preview of Mountain Lion starting Thursday. The rest of us will be able to download the finished product sometime “this summer,” according to Apple. Mountain Lion will be a paid download from the Mac App Store, like Lion, but Apple says it’s not yet ready to talk about price.

Looking at the company’s balance sheet, it’s obvious that Apple is defined by mobile. This next OS X release drives that point home even more, and shows that CEO Tim Cook meant what he said about iCloud being a company strategy for the next decade. Though Apple sold more Macs last quarter than ever before (5.2 million), that’s still not satisfactory for the company: with Mountain Lion taking on so many familiar traits of iOS, Apple clearly intends to make it more difficult for iPhone and iPad lovers who are Mac OS holdouts to continue to say no.

Here are some new features we’re going to see in Mountain Lion:

• Built-in iCloud integration. Setting up iCloud will be the second thing you do after setting up a new Mac with Mountain Lion. The big new thing in this version will be the ease with which you can access Documents in the Cloud, which will allow your documents created in Pages (or some other third-party apps) to be available on any Mac OS or iOS device.
• iMessage on Mac. Many people have been asking for this, and finally we’re going to get it. The Messages app, which will appear very familiar to iOS users, replaces iChat. It’ll let you start a conversation on a Mac and continue it on a different device, like your iPhone or iPad.
• Notes and Reminders. Any notes you make on a Mac or iOS device, along with any reminders you set for yourself, will show up on any of your Mac or iOS devices. Both apps can be searched and look easier to navigate with the additional screen space of a desktop. Notes can be “pinned” to your desktop.
• Notifications. Just like the drop-down Notification Center on iOS, the Mac is getting its own version in the top right corner of the screen. All reminders, app alerts and calendar appointments will appear there. And just like iOS, Mountain Lion Notification Center has its own swipe to bring up the window — two fingers right to left from the right edge of the trackpad.
• Sharing from apps. That sharing arrow that appears in iOS apps? Apple has inserted it in many Mac applications and dubbed it Share Sheet. That button will let you share web pages, notes, videos, QuickTime files, docs and photos via email, Messages, AirDrop or Twitter, or post photos or video to Vimeo or Flickr.
• Twitter integration in the OS. This is kind of a big deal for Twitter. When you share something via Twitter in Mountain Lion, a Tweet Sheet pops up, which looks like an index card with whatever it is you’re tweeting attached via paper clip.
• GameCenter. Apple’s social gaming network comes to the desktop, and brings with it a new opportunity for developers. With a new set of GameKit APIs, game creators can develop games for both Mac and iOS, so players can compete whether they’re on an Apple desktop or mobile device. Current Game Center-compatible iOS games will have to be converted to appear in the Mac App Store.
• AirPlay Mirroring to Apple TV. Just like an iPad or iPhone 4S, you will be able to mirror your Mac desktop on your TV via an Apple TV (as long as your Mac has an Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 processor).
• New security features. Gatekeeper lets users select settings to control which apps can be downloaded to a computer. You can choose to allow all apps, or only apps with a developer-signed ID program (run by Apple) to be downloaded. Or, for the most conservative choice, only apps from the Mac App Store.
• Improved features for Chinese users. Apple is making a special point to improve text input and make popular Chinese web services and apps a built-in choice for some applications for customers in its second-most important market.

The next version of Mac OS very much treats the Mac as an equal to the iPhone and iPad. With iCloud at the center of it all, it doesn’t matter where you start a game or save a document or save a note — the Mac is no longer the thing to which your mobile devices plug in. Apple has 100 million registered iCloud users now, and by making it easier to access it or sign up from new Macs with Mountain Lion, it’s sure to add to those numbers in short order.

The Mac's Notifications Center

But even in this mobile, post-PC world, Apple is showing it has no intention of letting the Mac just slink along. Its computers have always been outsold by its mobile devices: first the iPod, then the iPhone and the iPad. Rather than accept the idea that its mobile devices are more popular and focus all its energy there, Apple is making a move with the Mac.

Another effect of what Apple is able to do with these evolutions in its desktop OS is it’s bringing current and potential users further and further into its grip. That’s not meant to sound sinister — though to some people it may well be — it’s just that Apple is pressing even harder to make a customer’s decision to use competitors’ products that much more difficult.

Whether it’s making Mac OS feel familiar to happy iPhone and iPad customers so they won’t think of using another PC brand, or enabling people to set their computers so that only Apple-approved software is downloaded, all the work Apple has done for the last 15 years is paying off: Each of its products is set up to provide a halo effect on the others. That’s a really hard thing for any one manufacturer to do. But it’s because of Apple’s extreme focus that their products line up together so cohesively and logically. Not everyone is going to buy into it, but Apple makes doing so seem very easy.

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The show focused primarily on the iOS ecosystem, with traditional Mac OS X software pushed into the background. Special attention was paid to applications and accessories to get sound and video into and out of your iOS device, not just on the exhibit floor, but throughout Moscone West. Still, there were other hidden gems for everyday users, too.

Most of the OS X software developers weren’t showing new products or improvements, but demoing what they already have. One notable exception that drew me in was the newly launched latest version of Fantastical by Flexibits, which works in conjunction with OS X calendar software (iCal, BusyCal, Outlook) to quickly enter calendar items with natural language directly from the menu bar, kind of a Siri for the desktop.

Once you ignore the gimmicky stuff like iPhone cases with integrated bottle openers, and lots of bling (sparkle screen protectors from Crimsoncase), most user-aimed products seemed to want to make iDevices easier to use in more places. Judging by the show’s offerings, users seem to want to hold their iPad with one hand (Newertech, Hub Innovations, Grablet and others), make it waterproof (Drycase and Drybags), and have better input devices.

Steve Jobs would have shed a tear seeing so many ways to avoid using iOS device touchscreens. Some standouts are multiples styluses from Lafeada in the shape and style of lipstick and eyeliner, as well as Adonit’s Jot Stylus that had a “target” zone via a precision disk instead of the typical imprecise rubber tip found in most styluses. My favorite, though, was the NuScribe combo pen and stylus from Newer Technology. I love not having to carry both a pen and stylus.

Not only do people want to take their iOS devices everywhere, but they want to be able to take desktop functionality along for the ride. Nivio has a soon-to-be released subscription-based service called nDesktop that allows you to remotely run Windows applications as well as rent traditional software such as the Microsoft Office Suite on both your iPad as well as your OS X device, sort of like a more feature-rich version of OnLive Desktop’s free iPad Windows virtualization app. Sanho’s CloudFTP device is an iOS-friendly portable NAS server that is in the final stage of production after a successful Kickstarter launch. These products help fill the gap between the portability of iOS devices and the flexibility of the desktop, making the decision between an iPad and MacBook Air even more difficult.

Among the products geared towards consumers at the show, the lines between tablet and desktop computing are blurring, and the changed branding of Macworld| iWorld this year reflects that.

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SDKs and services

Audible Magic is showing its new TViD content recognition engine which can identify TV shows, including live events or first-time broadcasts. It creates a way for developers to build a second-screen experience tailored to what their users are watching.

Heatma.ps UI Testing SDK allows you to integrate touch tracking in your app to collect aggregate data from beta testers and/or real users of your app. Results are sent back heatma.ps’ server so you can view the data as a heat map of how users are interacting with your software, including where exactly their fingers are tapping.

MLState is demonstrating its Opa programming language targeted at web and social app development. Nuance is at the show talking about its consumer apps, but you could hit the company up for info on its mobile developer program if you’re looking to integrate voice in your iOS  software.

Payment solutions

For vendors that sell digital goods direct to consumers, eSellerate is at the show representing its e-commerce platform. You would use this instead of the Mac App Store, either to save money over the 30-percent fee Apple charges or because your app is prohibited from the App Store sandbox for whatever reason.

Fastspring is also present, talking about its all-in-one e-commerce, merchandising and fulfillment solution, which makes getting your sales tools in order an easy task, so you can focus on zapping bugs and getting a product shipped.

Prototyping and rapid development

TapDesigner is a new tool for prototyping mobile apps. It uses a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG interface to allow you to rapidly build visual representations of what your app will look like, complete with custom navigation and menu bar elements.

WidgetPress FormEntry is in the Mac OS X Zone, talking about its tool for creating forms-based apps for Mac and iOS. This could have potential applications in any number of industries; for example, a realtor could quickly deploy surveys for customers to help them identify exactly what kind of property they’re looking for.

Consulting services

Carr/Ferrell Attorneys are there to guide you with IP, licensing, contracts, and other legal needs, which are still a big concern with ongoing problems like the Lodsys saga. This is one of the thorniest aspects of software development, and ongoing legal disputes between the biggest companies involved could always potentially result in fallout for smaller players, too.

That’s my bite-sized overview of what iOS and Mac developers might find most interest at this year’s Macworld | iWorld conference. Chime in down in the comments if you saw some other interesting displays or vendors aimed at developer’s at the show.

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