Windows 8 vs. OS X Mountain Lion #Part1

It's surprising when you consider that Apple has released two new versions of its operating system versions in the time since Microsoft let the world know that Windows 8 was baking. The Redmond software giant first announced plans for its upcoming desktop and tablet operating system in January 2011 at CES.
Meanwhile, Apple released Lion, a major update, in July of that same year, and then Mountain Lion, a more incremental update, this past July.

In some ways, however, it's not so surprising: Windows 8 is a drastic re-imagining of the operating system, combining a touch-centric tablet OS with the traditional Windows desktop environment. Apple's strategy has been to more cautiously insert features from its mobile operating system, iOS, into the Mac's. It's also added multitouch gesture input support that assumes a touchpad for laptops or desktops. The result is ever-closer integration, with a minimum of dislocation to users—but no evolutionary leaps, either.
Microsoft has taken a far more drastic approach. It's designed Windows 8 to actually run on mobile tablets. Apple's wildly popular iPad by contrast runs its own version of iOS. While many old-timers have railed against the emphasis on touch input, it's easy to see why Microsoft took this approach: The company wants to leverage its massive 80 percent market share in desktop operating systems, while simultaneously familiarizing people with the new tile-based interface (formerly known as "Metro") first used in Windows Phone. But desktop users get benefits from Windows 8, too, including much faster startup and better boot security.

While Lion and Mountain Lion have been at large in the wild for months, we've also gotten a pretty good look at Windows 8, thanks to three pre-release publicly available versions: Developer Preview, Consumer Preview, and Release Preview. There's little mystery at this point about Windows 8's final shape when it's finally released on October 26, and developers and journalists have even already reviewed the RTM—release to manufacturing—version. So how do these two new operating systems' stack up? I'll take a look in some key areas. If there are important contrasts you'd like to point out, please do so in the comments; this list is by no means exhaustive!

Windows 8's Mobile-like User Interface

Windows 8's new interface shows more influence from Windows Phone than OS X Mountain Lion does from iOS. Window 8's large, touchable "live tiles" give quick access to and display info from your apps. Swiping gestures actually do a better job of letting you do everything using your thumbs than iOS does—which makes sense, since you mostly hold a tablet from both sides. The legacy "desktop interface," looks a lot like Windows 7, though gone is the eye candy of the latter's translucent Aero Glass effects. Also gone is the Start button, replaced by the tiled Start page.

Mountain Lion's Mobile-Inspired Elements

With a couple of important exceptions, most of Mountain Lion's inherited traits from iOS arrived with Lion or before. These include the App Store and Launchpad, which duplicates iOS's app icons, even letting you group them just as you would on an iPhone. Unfortunately, most of the Mac users I talk to never use Launchpad, preferring the traditional dock icons.

New for Mountain Lion is iMessage—iOS's messaging service that can take the place of SMS text messaging. It's pretty cool to be able to simulate an SMS text chat with one person on an iPhone and the other at her Mac desktop.

Another gift from iOS is Notification Center, which acts just like the mobile OS's notifications, which you see when you swipe down from the top of the screen. In Mountain Lion, you can swipe in from the left on a touchpad, and it shows an entry for each new email, message, software update, or calendar alert.

Mountain Lion's Cloud Service: iCloud

With Mountain Lion, iCloud becomes more important for Apple's desktop operating system. When you sign into your Apple account on a Mountain Lion Mac, all your mail settings, contacts, Safari bookmarks, messages, iTunes backups and other features will be synced via iCloud. And when you launch the App Store, all the apps you purchased earlier through the App Store are available for downloading and installation. Mountain Lion also builds cloud-based file storage into TextEdit, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Microsoft makes SkyDrive simply available to any app developer, and many Windows 8 apps already take advantage of this.

Windows 8's Cloud Service: SkyDrive

I covered Microsoft's SkyDrive service extensively in Windows 8 and the Cloud: SkyDrive. Like iCloud, SkyDrive can sync all your devices' settings; in fact, Microsoft likes referring to SkyDrive as a "device cloud." In addition to this function, the service can serve as simple online storage, and actually works with Macs and iOS devices as well as Windows, Android, and Windows Phone. Just as with iCloud, SkyDrive remembers which apps you've purchased and lets you download and install them on another machine you sign in to your Microsoft Account.

A big difference between SkyDrive and iCloud is that it offers Web access to any files you've stored on it. But SkyDrive becomes more than just a service for Microsoft products: Any Windows 8 third-party apps can make use of it as well, storing files to the cloud and retrieving them back. Another cool capability of SkyDrive is Fetch, which lets you grab a file from a PC running the SkyDrive software even if the desired file hasn't been uploaded to the online storage.

The Mac App Store

Apple's mobile OS showed the value to a platform maker of offering an app store: The store owner can control which apps are offered, and more importantly, collect a premium from the software maker. But the user gets something out of this setup, too: You can install purchased apps on any of your other Macs, and updates are handled uniformly, with notifications when they're available. The Mac App Store launched with about a thousand apps, but some estimate there are now about 10,000.

Windows 8's App Store: The Windows Store

Microsoft finally got hip to the app store concept and decided to build it into its hybrid tablet/desktop OS. In many respects, the Windows Store works nearly identically to Apple's: It lets you install apps you've purchased on multiple machines you sign into, and handles updating in a unified manner. The terms for developers are a bit more generous than those of Apple's app stores.
The Windows Store isn't as rich in browsing options as Mac App Store, since you have to page through the categories. The Windows Store is estimated to launch with about a thousand apps, and there are millions of legacy Windows apps that will still run on Intel-based Windows 8 machines. See #Part2 - #Part3

Source Article; By Michael Muchmore  for PC MAG