News: the Mountain Lion release edition

Apple has released the next big version of their operating system to the pulic, and there's lots of little refinements and a few new features in Mountain Lion to get excited about. It's available for download right now from the Mac App Store provided you're running either Snow Leopard for $24.99, and the installation process works much the same as Lion before it: you download a 4.4GB installer file, which then installs Mountain Lion on your Mac after rebooting. Pretty simple stuff. Now, to the reviews. While you're waiting for your new OS X install to dowload or install, you can read a few reviews. There's John Siracusa's massive, 26,000 word review over at Ars Technica, or even John Gruber's review (one of his longer pieces in a while) at Daring Fireball. I haven't made my way through any of the reviews just yet, but I can already have an educated guess at what they're going to say: Mountain Lion is the best operating system for the Mac thus far.

Apps were already being updated for the Retina display and for Mountain Lion long before it was actually released to the public, so it should come as no suprise that the app updates just keep coming. Fantastical has been added to the list of updated apps.

Speaking of updated apps, the app compatibility table at RoaringApps does a fine job of telling you if a particular app works with Apple's latest Mac operating system.