With Apple announcing the summer release of the new OS X Mountain Lion operating system, Mac users will be forgiven for being a little bit excited about the unexpected OS which makes a huge step towards the fusing of OS X and iOS. The newest Mac operating system builds on the current Lion offering, but adds additional features which Apple describe as "being inspired by the iPad, re-invented for the Mac".
On Wednesday, Microsoft officially released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview (which is essentially a fancy term for 'public beta'). If you're eager to dabble around with the build in a virtual machine - perhaps due to the lack of a non-production machine, a spare partition, the fear of using it in a production environment, or, well, if you just want to install it in a virtual machine - then you're in luck.
Although many computer and software makers out there are largely similar in key areas, there are a few elements which make Apple and its Mac/OS X/iOS combination just that little bit classier.
Amid all the talk of the iPad 3, Digitimes has remembered that Apple does indeed release other products besides the now hotly-anticipated third tablet installment - set to be launched on March 7th.
When Apple announced Mac OS X - sorry, we don't use the 'Mac' designation now, do we? - 10.8 Mountain Lion last week, we were all taken aback slightly. Well, all of us except the lucky few who found themselves summoned for a private briefing with Apple SVP Phil Schiller that is.
Apple's new CEO Tim Cook held his first shareholder meeting yesterday, and it seems the guy is pretty bullish on what his company is going to offer to us gadget junkies over the coming months.
Carriers have had their customers over a metaphorical barrel for years, with over-priced SMS messages chief amongst the methods that have seen our cellular providers take us to the cleaners on regular occasions. The SMS example is made even more galling when you take into consideration how little data is used by each message.
The Mac App Store is still in its infancy when compared to its older brother, the iOS App Store. Opened officially in January 2011, it celebrated its first birthday last month and has been an extremely successful outlet for Apple in those twelve months. The Mac App Store offers digital downloads of software in similar fashion to the iOS application outlet but contains software designed and developed for machines running Mac OS X 10.6.6 and later.
VLC is, without a shadow of doubt, one of the most popular media players available. Combining a sleek, simplistic interface with the ability to play seemingly any audio or video file, its underbelly of rich features have seen the application become an essential utility to the masses.
Following Apple's announcement of its upcoming Mountain Lion OS yesterday, people naturally began producing comparisons between the two OSes, whether in the form of a jestful "Windows 8 vs. ML" tweet, or a clarifying blog post that reminds you - since you didn't know - that desktop OSes are beginning to draw a great deal of inspiration from their mobile counterparts. But really, that's about the only true similarity between Mountain Lion and Windows 8. Beyond this, Apple and Microsoft's approaches are so vastly different that the colossal void that lies between the opposing directions they have taken is large enough to accommodate all of those comparison posts from yesterday. So, let me commence this actually sensible comparison between the two approaches to the desktop and tablet markets.
