OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion won’t be available for most users to play with this summer, but if you’d like to try out a little slice of it already, you can already download the Messages beta for Mac, which replaces iChat and allows you to send unlimited free messages to any Mac, iPad, iPhone or iPod touch through the iMessage protocol!
The beta can be downloaded by anyone here. The features are:
Send unlimited iMessages to any Mac, iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.*
Start an iMessage conversation on your Mac and continue it on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.
Send photos, videos, attachments, contacts, locations, and more.
Launch a FaceTime video call and bring the conversation face-to-face.
Messages supports iMessage, AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber accounts.
We’re already running it, and it feels like a substantial update to iChat, which I always thought was a pretty terrible IM program. What do you think?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
9 responses to “Want A Taste Of Mountain Lion? Download Messages Beta Now!”
not available for me. In Germany it says “
Es tut uns Leid, aber in Ihrem Programm ist ein unerwarteter
Fehler aufgetreten. Dieses Problem wurde vermerkt, und es wurde eine
entsprechende E-Mail an die Administratoren gesendet. Bitte versuchen
Sie den Ladevorgang in ein einigen Stunden noch einmal.”
Same message in the US. Just wait a bit, it’s due to high traffic.
if you need a download link for Messages App while Apple server down :) http://bit.ly/xi9JhN
Working fine for me here in Scotland!
It’s pretty good so far, messages getting delivered nicely and good use of dragging and dropping photos and video into the messages. However, it does take a considerable amount of time for the messages sending from the mac to actually appear on the iphone and ipad, so the conversations don’t quite marry up fully in sync (yet)
I am a bit worried with this release. What is throwing a red flag up to me right now was that the default message bubble color was orange. What on earth uses orange in the Apple universe? Little design elements like that are what apple is supposed to nail. With out Steve, it looks like that will get over looked.
Mine was blue. Maybe it picked up your previous iChat setting, as it replaced that app.
As a whole, Messages has been kind of spotty for myself and two friends so far, as far as getting the messages on every device.
Interesting. I never used iChat before though.
When will iMessage for iOS also be multi system friendly? (AIM, Google, etc.)