Apple OS X Mountain Lion - How might this enhance our creative workflows?

Creative COW by Walter Biscardi

Apple has recently announced that a new OS is already on the horizon for the Mac, OS X Mountain Lion. If you watch the overview video on the website, it does a nice job of presenting the basic features of the OS and how it draws a lot of features from the iOS devices. I’ve seen a couple of early articles that make a big deal out of the fact that that new name is just OS X, not Mac OS X. I honestly don’t care about the name, I think this is more about Apple recognizing that OS X Lion was not quite ready for prime time and instead of updating it, they’re replacing it with a new OS.

But after watching the video overview, I am very intrigued by how easily it shares information with the iOS devices.

Right now it is pretty easy to share information from your iPad / iPhone apps in the form of emails and PDFs for the most part. As in, you create a document or a drawing or information on your iDevice and then send it to someone on a Mac as a PDF, JPEG or email to share. But for many iOS apps, you can’t share the original document to be edited with the same or similar app on the Mac laptop / desktop. There’s usually a workaround that you “bring the file into this other app on your computer, make the changes, then you can send it back to the iPad where our app will read it.”

But if Mountain Lion is going to be bringing iOS elements to the desktop / laptop realm, this can open up exciting possibilities for the creative professional. Will it soon be possible for…

A) Much tighter integration between iOS Apps and Mac Desktop / Laptop apps?

B) iOS Apps to be able to run on a Mac Desktop or Laptop? read more...