 Hey guys, it's Neil Iyer with The Verge. I'm here with a developer preview of Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Don't let the name fool you. Unlike Snow Leopard to Leopard, Mountain Lion is actually a pretty big upgrade over Lion with some pretty major features. Let's go through them. When you first log in to a Mountain Lion machine, you're going to be prompted for your Apple ID and to enable iCloud. This will pull down your App Store information, your iTunes information. It'll set up FaceTime. It'll set up iCloud. iCloud will immediately begin pulling down your contacts, your calendars, all your other information. So you're getting the iCloud experience right from first setup with Mountain Lion. The first major new feature in Mountain Lion is Messages. It's actually the iChat app, but it's been renamed to Messages. And in addition to supporting Google Talk, Yahoo, and AOL and some Messenger, it now supports Apple's proprietary iMessage service. So you can see the interface has been totally redone. It looks a lot like the iPad app. And it actually just works. So if I say hello to Ross here, it's going to pop up there. You can see it showed up on the iPad. It showed up on the phone. Ross can say something back to me. He has no idea that I sent him this from a computer. Hey, what's up? I can pick up the phone. I can say nothing. It's a pretty awesome conversation that we're having right now. So I said nothing. It showed up on the computer. It showed up on the iPad. I can go over here after Ross responds with some cutting remark about what do I want. I want you to die. Messages is also integrated with FaceTime. So if I want to go ahead and call William, I can just go ahead and call him directly from Messages. It's going to open the FaceTime app. It's going to start ringing. Come over here. You answered. William is a panda bear. How you doing? Pretty good, man. Pretty good. Lastly, Messages also supports the classic services Google Talk, AOL, and some Messenger. I can just go over here. I've got the window. This is a pretty familiar window. You can see Paul's a pretty cool dude. I can open up a regular sort of IAM window and talk to Paul the usual way, but all my Messages will still be logged in the new UI. Another major feature of Mountain Lion is Notification Center. It's built exactly like the iOS Notification Center. When you get a new message in other apps, so if I get an iMessage right here, you can see the notification pop down from the top of the screen. It's in the top right. And I can either click on the new notification light. This lights up blue when you get a notification. Or I can use a new gesture, which is a two-finger swipe from the right to the left of the trackpad. So I just swipe with two fingers and reveal Notification Center. I can see here the two Messages that William sent me. If I click on one, it instantly pops me back into Messages. You can get all kinds of notifications there, mail, Messages, FaceTime. There's also an API so developers can send their own notifications, just like iOS. iCal is now Calendar. You can see it still has the same kind of gross texture at the top as the Lion Calendar, but the interface has been slightly changed. Calendars are now in a permanent window on the left here instead of being that kind of pop over that disappeared. Reminders looks just like the app on the iPad. If you've seen that, you're going to be very familiar with this. It's so bare bones it doesn't even have a preference I like right now, but it definitely works and it syncs with iCloud so you can get all your reminders on all your devices. Next up is Notes. Notes has been pulled out of Mail and made into its own app in Mountain Lion. It looks just like the app on the iPhone, just like the app on the iPad. You can actually pop open a note and set it aside. You can set this to be always on top. So if I open up another app here, it'll be on top of Safari even though Safari is open. And I can close it and it's still in the main list here. You can sync notes across different accounts, whether it be iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo. You'll also find Share buttons throughout Mountain Lion, just like in iOS. So here I am in Safari and to the left of the address bar, you can see there's a Share button. Hit Twitter, it brings up the tweet sheet. I can type, this is cool, just like I can in iOS. I can hit Add Location. There's location services. It knows I'm in New York. If I was so inclined, I could hit Send and tweet it out. Oddly there's no Facebook or YouTube support globally with the Share button, but certain apps support it. So if I look in QuickTime, for example, QuickTime will let you send a video to Facebook and send a video to YouTube. But that's only in QuickTime at the moment. Mountain Lion also includes Game Center, which is not fully enabled in the preview build that we have, but Apple demoed it to us. It's exactly a game center on the iPad. It lets you find games, lets you find your friends, lets you play against opponents. It also lets you do multiplayer against iOS devices. Apple showed us a demo of real racing on the iPad playing against real racing on the Mac. Mountain Lion also includes AirPlay Mirroring, which lets you send your Mac's display to an Apple TV. It's output is 720p and it intelligently scales so you don't have to think about what resolution your computer's at. You get stereo audio and you can mirror games, you can mirror shows and videos from the iTunes store. You can mirror pretty much anything that shows up on your Mac screen. Mountain Lion also includes a major new security feature called Gatekeeper, which protects Macs against malware. Out of the box, Mountain Lion will only run apps from the Mac App Store and apps that have been signed by the developer. Developers can get security certificates from Apple, a new addition to the $99 Mac Developer program. Apple's insistent that they're not trying to curate the web or lock down what developers can do, they just want apps to be trusted by users. If you want, you can still set your Mac to run apps from anywhere and even when you have your Mac locked down, you can right click on an unsigned app and run it individually. There's also a whole host of other little tweaks and changes throughout Mountain Lion. There's no more software update. All software update is handled through the Mac App Store. When you go and click on software update in the Apple menu, it pops right open to the update in the Mac App Store. When there are new software updates, you get an update directly in Notification Center. Safari now has a unified address bar and search field just like Chrome. There are a bunch of new features for Chinese users. China is Apple's fastest growing market and they're making a big push to cater to Chinese users. There are new input methods, there are new accounts, and the share button supports a bunch of popular Chinese services like Youku. Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is available for developers today if you're part of the developer program, you can go get a beta right now. For consumers, it will be out in summer 2012. Apple hasn't said how much it will cost, but it will be a paid update in the Mac App Store when it's released.