Clicking on the icon slides the OS X desktop over to the left to reveal Notification Center itself, which looks identical to iOS 5 - it even has the same linen texture. Notifications appear at the top right of the screen as banners that automatically slide away after five seconds or alerts that require some user interaction to disappear, and a new icon on the right side of the menu bar lights up blue when new notifications arrive. But look a little deeper and it's clear that Apple has a very different idea about how notifications should work - an idea that's unsurprisingly almost exactly how they work in iOS 5. Mac users have relied on the excellent open-source Growl notification system for years now, so the addition of Notifications Center to Mountain Lion seems a bit anticlimactic at first glance. That's partially to match the breakneck pace of iOS development, but also to capitalize on the growing popularity of the Mac in general - Mac sales have outgrown the general PC market for something like six years now, and Apple says it's investing heavily in the platform to build on that trend. Mountain Lion also represents a dramatic speedup in the pace of OS X updates: Apple says it'll be issuing yearly updates from now on. And note the name change - Apple's dropping the "Mac" and simply calling it OS X Mountain Lion. Yes, those are all headline iOS features as well Mountain Lion continues Apple's cycle of using the iPhone and iPad to influence Mac development and vice versa.
It's only been seven months since Apple launched Mac OS 10.7 Lion, but the company isn't sitting still: it just announced the developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, a tweaked and enhanced new version of the operating system that includes major new features like Notification Center, AirPlay mirroring, and iMessage.
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