iMessage for the Mac

Apple is working on a new Operation System which will be released in summer 2012. The name of the new System will have the name OS X Mountain Lion and one of the new features will be iMessage. Other features such as the Reminder, the Notification Center as well as the Game Center will sound familiar for those who use iDevices such as the iPhone, iPad or the iPod Touch. I personally wished for iMessage on the Mac after the release of iOS 5. For me it was kind of a logical step to have iMessage on the Mac as a chat system that will combine the world of the Mac with the mobile world.

Having a chat function on a computer isn’t that new and text messages is also something we are familiar with. Many of us might have used already some online service to send a text message online.

Well and after Apple released iOS 5 with the iMessage I had a deep feeling that it will come to the MAC as well and I am glad that I was right. For those of you who want to get a sneak peak Apple released a BETA which you can download today to test the new iMessage on your MAC.

What you might need will be of course an iClod account, but if you have many Apple products you may have an iCloud account already. So download it, enter your Apple ID and test iMessage. I did it and it is working just fine.

If you are interested here is the link:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/messages-beta/

I did test the new feature and must admit I enjoyed it very much to use my computer to send messages to my friends. For me it is a great feature and you should at least check it out.

iPhone 5 release date October 4th, 2011?

Apple was presenting last June the new stuff they were working on. One was, at the time, the new OS Lion. I was writing about the new OS and also wrote a little “first impression” post, which you can find here. But Apple also announced some more cool things, like the new iOS 5, a system called iCloud and this was leading, in my opinion, to many speculation about the iPhone 5 release date as well as the new MacBook Pro design changes. I was reading many articles, comments and rumours about the two devices. Some were just fantasy, some had great and logical arguments but all of them were nothing but rumours. I liked the story about an Apple employee who lost his new iPhone 5 in a coffee shop and also the debates on various forums when the new MacBook Pro will come. Maybe late 2011, early 2012 or maybe summer 2012?

MAC OSX Lion – my first impression

 

The new OS from Apple is now available in the Apple App Store, as mentioned in my previous post. I had a chance to play around a bit and would like to share some of my experience. First thing first the new OS looks fantastic. The upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion toke a while, but I had no problem to install the new OS even on a MacBook from June 2009.

But let us talk about some of the new features. I will try to keep it short and will list just mention a few such as Mail, Address Book, iCal, Gesture and Mission Control.

The new Mail
Apple learned of course allot from the iPad and iPhone as well. I heard before Lion was released, that new Mail would look a bit like that. So I opened Mail and was checking it out. Nice feature is that you can “Hide” and “Show” all your Mailboxes. In the next column I have all my Emails listed and the last column has a preview of the Email I selected. But now there is one very cool feature I would like to mention here.

Apple – 2011 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference

Last weekend I had some time to watch the almost 2h long – 2011 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference – video on YouTube and in that video Apple announced lots of amazing things. The first part was of course about the new Mac OS X, called Lion. Based on Apples announcement Lion will have 250 new features, but in the video they mentioned just the 10 key features. Understandable, because they wanted to talk about the new iOS 5 and iCloud as well.

Mac OS X Lion release date – July 2011

The new Mac OS X Lion is on its way, the release date is announced on the Apple website. The price will be $29.99 and Apple claims that it will have 250 new features such as Multi-Touch gesture, full screen apps, Mission Control a new Mail as well as Auto Save and Air Drop to name just a few. The new Operation System from Apple will be available in the App Store as an upgrade for the Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 and this upgrade will be just 4GB.