Chitika’s data, which is culled from its extensive ad network, showed that Lion remained at 14 percent adoption still three months after it was released last summer. As the chart below shows, the most popular Mac OS X version is the version that came before Lion, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which is on 45.5 percent of Macs still.

Two possible reasons why the adoption of Mountain Lion is outpacing Lion: Mountain Lion is a bit cheaper than Lion at $19.99 compared to $29.99. But Lion was also considered a largely evolutionary upgrade and, as Om put it, was a confusing cacophony of new features. Mountain Lion, on the other hand, has been positively reviewed as a much better upgrade, and includes some very important pieces to Apple’s overall product vision, including iCloud.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015

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?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
• How emerging technologies will influence collaboration
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate

First, BusyCal doesn’t have that annoying faux leather iPad style interface. It retains an unadorned look more in line with older versions of iCal. There are hacks to return your iCal to classic mode, but sensible good looks isn’t the only thing BusyCal is offering.

BusyCal supports direct syncing of calenders between computers, and if you desire, can bypass the cloud altogether. Otherwise the app supports syncing to any CalDAV service such as MobileMe as well as Google. Setting up Google Calendar sycning is a breeze. You put in your credentials and away you go. Your calendars instantly appear. Lion’s iCal requires a few additional steps to add multiple calendars, which is both annoying and unnecessary.

In iCal for Lion, the calendar list floats on top of your calendar, making it near impossible to view both it and your calendar list. BusyCal retains a unique column for your entire calendar list, as well as a month at-a-glance view (mini-month). Although BusyCal doesn’t have iCal’s yearly view, it does have a list view of all your upcoming events, regardless of when they fall, and can integrate daily events into an optional icon on the menu bar. This is a handy feature to answer the basic question of where you have to be today.

Other nice features in BusyCal include the ability to add graphics to an event, as well as sticky notes and custom banners. These features will even sync with other BusyCal users, but won’t sync with your iPhone or Android device. Best of all is that BusyCal will show you the daily forecast with highs and lows right on the day in question.

Although Lion introduced some great new features, iCal is one giant step backwards in my opinion. BusyCal on the other hand retains great features from Snow Leopard’s iCal, while adding some new ones as well. BusyCal is sold directly for via the Mac App Store for $49.99 ($79.99 for a family pack), which is more than Lion costs as a whole, but the price of entry may be worth it to users that once relied on some iCal features that are no longer there.

Disclosure: Busymac provided a copy of BusyCal for review purposes.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”

1. Disable zooming in mouse preferences

If this is really annoying you, simply disable this feature entirely. You can do this by unchecking the Smart Zoom feature on the Point & Click settings in the Mouse section of System Preferences.

2. Install a better preference configuration tool

On the other hand, if you do want to use your touch sensitive mouse to its fullest potential, consider installing either MagicPrefs or BetterTouchTool. Even if you’re not having problems, you may find either of these two tools very handy.  Both tools are free and have recently been updated to allow the user to take much more fine-grained control over their touch experience on OS X Lion.  For example, with BetterTouchTool, you can control the sensitivity of the Magic Mouse, and how it registers touch events.

3. Replace your mouse with a Magic Trackpad

Finally, it may be time to just get rid of that antiquated input device called a “mouse” and get a Magic Trackpad.  Even if you have a MacBook, you may find the location of the Magic Touchpad to either side of the keyboard more ergonomically comfortable than to have it sandwiched in the middle front of the keyboard.  Personally, I’ve found that I use my Magic Trackpad far more often in OS X Lion than I use my Magic Mouse, even though the situation was reversed when I was using Snow Leopard.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Consumer privacy in the mobile advertising era
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

Welcome to another instalment of Tips and Tricks, the series which aims to teach you something useful about one of your Apple products. This time, we’ll be focusing on Mail 5, the new version that ships with OS X Lion. There a few new tips that apply specifically to Mail 5, and also some existing tricks that should come in handy no matter which version you’re using.

Show your own messages in Conversation View

The new Conversation View (View > Organize by Conversation) in Mail 5 is great for keeping up with, well, a conversation. However, by default, it doesn’t show messages you’ve sent in reply during the conversation, which makes it harder to follow exactly what is being said and why.

To show your own messages in the thread along with those you receive from others, open Mail’s preferences, either under the Mail menu in the menu bar, or by pressing Command-comma. Then go to the Viewing tab, and under the ‘View conversations’ header, check the Include related messages option. Your sent messages will now show up in Conversation view.

Use Rules to color emails from certain people

If you’d like to highlight emails which came from someone important, like your boss, perhaps, Mail has a perfect way to do so. Using Rules, you can set the background color of an email in the list.

To do this, open up Mail’s preferences again, and this time open the Rules tab. Click the Add Rule button on the right, and a sheet will slide down with some options. Set the condition to From is [the person's email address]. Then underneath, set the action to Set color of background to [the color you want to use]. Click OK, and your rule will be added. From now on, whenever an email arrives from the address you specified, the message will be colored.

Show an unread counter in the Menu Bar

This tip will be useful to those of you who keep the Dock hidden, or have turned off the Dock unread count for Mail. This does involve downloading an extra piece of software, since Mail doesn’t support a menu bar item natively. The software is called Mail Unread Menu, and can be downloaded from MacUpdate. Once downloaded, all you have to do is run it, and you’ll have an unread count in the menu bar. There are also quite a few customization options available, such as the ability to choose the icon displayed in the menu bar for Mail, by clicking the menu item and choosing Preferences.

Change the names of Mail’s flags

In Mail 5, you can assign a colored flag to each message. There are seven colors to choose from, and they can be used for organising messages, since Mail automatically creates Smart Mailboxes for each flag you use. By default, the flags are named after the color of the flag, which isn’t very useful. There is a way, however, to change the names of the flags.

To change a flag’s name, first select a message and add the flag to it. Without adding the flag to at least one message, you can’t change its name. Once you have done so with all the flags you want to rename, you’ll see a new Flagged section in the Reminders area of the sidebar.

To rename a flag once it shows up there, right click it and choose Rename Mailbox from the menu. Then type the new name for your flag and press Enter.

Once you’ve pressed Enter, the flag’s name will change not only in the sidebar, but also in the drop down list of flags in the tool bar. This makes it much easier to remember what each of the colors means.

Flags also remember their names even if there are no messages with that flag applied to them.

Got any other tips and tricks regarding Apple’s default Mail app to share? Let us know in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why the iPad is Right for the Enterprise
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage

The big choices

General. Most choices here are purely cosmetic, like changing the highlight color, or how many items show up in the recent menu. In OS X Lion, however, you can make one important choice: whether or not to restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps. Unchecking this will stop applications from opening up the last-used files or web pages. This cannot be set on a per-app basis. Leaving this checked is good if you want to get back up and running quickly after a system reboot, bu bad if you’re giving a presentation and the last file you had open was a video of your bachelor party in Vegas.

Mission Control. The main choice here is if you want Dashboard to launch in its own space. Leaving this checked will keep it default (own space). Unchecking it means when you open the Dashboard it will work like it did in Snow Leopard, which is as an overlay on your main screen. I would have set it back to the Snow Leopard setting, but I’m using Josh’s excellent tip to map my Dashboard key to the Launchpad.

Language and Text. If you don’t like Lion auto-correcting words as you type, you can disable here. Or, you kuld just lrn to spel. For obvious reasons, I quite like this setting.

Security and Privacy. This is where you can turn Filevault encryption on. Previous versions of Filevault were fairly useless, but Filevault 2 (the one that’s included with Lion) is actually quite handy. For one thing, it’s a disc-level encryption that needs to be unlocked for your Mac to boot. I’d check this if you’re ever concerned about someone getting data from your Mac without your say-so. Also, you can turn your Mac’s firewall off and on from this preference pane.

Trackpad. Until Lion, I hadn’t realized the way I’d been scrolling was “unnatural,” but I’m glad Lion set us right in that regard. If the reverse scrolling drives you nuts you can set it back to unnatural, err, normal, err, the way it used to be, here. That said, I’d encourage you to give it a try for a few weeks. I wasn’t thrilled with it at all, but after a few days I quite liked it.

The little things

Desktop and Screensaver. This is where you can go to change your wallpaper and screensaver, as you may have guessed. But it’s also the place you can go to turn off the translucent menu bar.

Time Machine: Sadly, you can’t turn off Lion’s Autosave and Versioning features, assuming an app supports them. However, what you can change in Time Machine is the length of time before a file is locked. The default is two weeks after the last save.

Energy Saver: Here’s where you can change how often your hard drive and screen go to sleep. I’ve unchecked the setting to dim my display when using the battery, because I like my screen set to maximum brightness. However, leaving it checked is a good way to find out in a hurry when someone accidentally unplugs your laptop if you like to work in high-traffic areas.

Those are some ways you can customize your Mac without needing to use a third-party utility. Feel free to share your own suggestions about third-party preference panes that make things even better in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• New challenges for the IT organization
• The new IT manager, part 1

New owners of the latest Air and Mac mini will find fixes for issues related to flickering screens, booting problems when the power cord is attached, and slow running SD cards. Specifically, Apple says the update will:

• Address an issue that may cause the system to become unresponsive when playing a video in Safari
• Resolve an issue that may cause system audio to stop working when using HDMI or optical audio out
• Improve the reliability of Wi-Fi connections
• Resolve an issue that prevents transfer of your data, settings, and compatible applications to a new Mac running OS X Lion
• Resolve an issue where MacBook Air may boot up when MagSafe Adapter is attached
• Resolve an issue causing intermittent display flickering on MacBook Air
• Resolve an issue that causes the SD card slot in Mac mini to run at reduced speed with SD and SDHC media

If you have Lion, but not on one either the Mac mini or the Air, you’ll get a separate update that only pertains to the first four issues listed above.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Consumer privacy in the mobile advertising era
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
• The future of notebooks: Following in the footsteps of the MacBook Air

The tiny flash drive carries a full copy of OS X Lion so that you can install and reinstall OS X and access disk utility without an Internet connection. This could come in handy for customers who feel left out of Apple’s bold new future of digital-only distribution.

Still, $69 is a lot to pay for a product that Apple is selling for $29.99 on the Mac App Store. But Apple likely has at least a couple of very good reasons for charging more: First, the cost of a wide-distribution physical format probably wasn’t factored into Lion’s pricing prior to launch, and second, Apple would much rather customers shop through the Mac App Store, since it clearly has a lot invested in the idea that digital distribution is the future (that’s the whole point behind the Mac App Store, after all).

At least users can take comfort in the fact that the thumb drive version of Lion carries the same far-reaching licensing conditions as does the digital version, meaning you can install OS X on any “Macs you own or control running Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Snow Leopard Server.” Just note that if you install Lion using the USB drive, you won’t be able to use Lion Recovery to reinstall your system.

What do you think of the Lion USB drive and its price tag?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

Skip the click-and-hold

Mac App Store apps that are in your Launchpad can be moved by clicking and holding their icons, and deleted then clicking the ‘x’ that appears in the corner of each icon. It’s possible to delete and move them without waiting for that delay, though. Instead of clicking and holding an icon, simply hold the Option key on the keyboard. The icons will start to wiggle instantly, and you’ll be able to delete and move the apps.

You can also move the icons without them being in the ‘editing mode’. You can move them around simply by clicking or tapping and dragging; the icons don’t have to be wiggling to be moved.

Clear Launchpad and start again

If your Launchpad is anything like mine, it has all sorts of applications listed that you’d rather not see, such as Adobe help apps, or uninstallers. If you’d like to only have Launchpad show the apps you actually use, you can clear Launchpad completely and add the apps manually. It may be time consuming to add all the apps again, but it should stop Launchpad feeling so bloated.

1. First off, make a backup of the current Launchpad database. That way, if something goes wrong, you can restore Launchpad back to how it was. To do this, open [Your username] > Library > Application Support > Dock and make a copy of the file that’s in there. In order to get to the Library folder, you may have to use the Finder’s Go menu with the option key held down, since Lion hides it by default.
2. Now open up Terminal from Applications > Utilities. Once it’s open, paste the following command:

   sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps; \
     DELETE from groups WHERE title<>''; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;" \
     && killall Dock

3. Launchpad should now be empty. You can add apps back in by dragging them from the Applications folder onto the Launchpad icon.

If you’d like to restore Launchpad to how it was when you first installed Lion, simply delete the file you made a copy of from the Application Support > Dock folder. Next time you launch Launchpad, it should be back to normal.

Hide certain apps

If you’d rather not delete everything from Launchpad, or you aren’t comfortable using the Terminal, there is a preference pane you can download which allows you to select certain apps to hide from Launchpad. It’s called Launchpad-Control, and can be downloaded from this website.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the preference pane, you can find it under “Other” in System Preferences. In the Launchpad-Control pane, you’ll find a list of apps that are currently in Launchpad. You can uncheck the box next to an app’s name to hide it from Launchpad. Click apply, and you’ll briefly see the Dock disappear. Once it returns, open Launchpad and the apps you unchecked will no longer appear there.

Set up a Launchpad keyboard shortcut

Unless you bought a Mac after Lion was released, your keyboard probably doesn’t have a shortcut key for opening Launchpad. It’s very easy to set one up using System Preferences.

1. Open System Preferences and open the Keyboard preference pane. In there, select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
2. From the source list on the left, select Launchpad & Dock. Now find Show Launchpad from the list on the right.
3. Double-click on the right hand side of the entry for Show Launchpad. A small text field should appear. Now type the shortcut you’d like to use for showing Launchpad. You can now use that shortcut to show and hide Launchpad using your keyboard.

Especially f you don’t like having Launchpad in the Dock, this makes it much easier to open it. You could even remap the Dashboard key to open Launchpad, if you wish.

Do you know of any other time-saving or organizational tips for Launchpad? Tell us below in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Development strategies for the app-developer community
• Mobile 2012 and beyond