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Here at Cult of Mac, we’re a big fan of HipChat, a phenomenal team calibration tool based around group chat and IM, which works on any platform with dedicated apps for Mac and iOS. In fact, it’s how we keep in touch with each other throughout each work day. The app is a mainstay in our docks.

So when we woke up this morning and found out Apple was announcing a new version of OS X including a brand new Messages IM app, the first thing we thought was: “Hey! That icon looks familiar!” Very familiar.

Chances are, you’re already salivating to download the latest version of OS X, Mountain Lion, when it’s released later this summer. For a fair number of Mac owners, though, installing Mountain Lion is going to require buying a new machine, as Apple has abandoned support for Intel’s GMA 950 and x3100 chipsets.

Here’s a list of the machines that can run Lion that can’t run Mountain Lion.

Apple has included a more subtle, yet very important, change in OS X Mountain Lion that points to the company’s focus moving forward. If you open the “About This Mac” window in the Mountain Lion developer preview, you’ll notice that “Mac” has been dropped for a simpler “OS X.” The prefix has also been dropped from promotional materials on Apple.com and the Mac App Store.

Why the change to just “OS X Mountain Lion?” Apple is continuing to blur the line between hardware and software. It’s about the unification of iOS and the desktop experience.

With Mountain Lion, Apple has finally tied iCloud to the Mac desktop. While iCloud has worked seamlessly on iOS since launch, moving documents between iCould and your Mac was embarrassingly awkward, involving web browsers, dragging and dropping.

Now, it has been shoved deep into the heart of the OS, in the form of a kind of alternate Finder.

Not a huge change, but we just noticed that in OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has changed the way adding widgets in Dashboard works to be more akin to Launchpad, with a full screen of equally spaced widgets being selectable instead of Lion’s approach, which puts available widgets at the bottom edge of the display.

In case you hadn’t already noticed, Apple announced OS X Mountain Lion earlier today, its latest operating system for the Mac which will make its public debut this summer. Mountain Lion will further increase the iOS influence on Apple’s desktop operating system, with the arrival of features like Notification Center, Messages, and Notes.

But for gamers, undoubtedly the most exiting new feature will be Game Center’s arrival on the Mac. With promises of cross-platform multiplayer and the ability to rack up achievements on both your Mac and iOS devices, this is set to create a new bridge between mobile and desktop gaming that will revolutionize cross-platform play.

In OS X Lion, the Mail, Contacts And Calendars systems pref pane allowed you to choose accounts between iCloud, Microsoft Exchange, MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL… but check out how many more options you have in Mountain Lion! We know that Twitter is integrated into Mountain Lion, but you can also log into video sharing site Vimeo and photo sharing site Flickr, presumably to make sharing photos and videos online easier. However, we have yet seen any functionality taking advantage of this deeper integration. There’s also support for a host of new Chinese sites and more.

This is interesting. With OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has ditched Software Update as a standalone application, and instead baked its functionality into the Mac App Store’s “Updates” panel. Now if you hit Software Update, the Mac App Store loads and all of the integral software updates are found under a drop-down box under OS X Update.

Mountain Lion’s GateKeeper feature is designed to improve Mac security by harnessing the power of the Mac App Store and through a new developer program in which Apple will offer Developer IDs to members of its Mac Developer Program. Those IDs will let developers digitally sign their applications so that Mountain Lion Macs can verify an app’s authenticity and security before running it.

While this may seem like a new approach and an extension of the Mac App Store model, it’s actually based on technology that has been part of OS X since the release of Leopard.

Have you ever wondered how Apple gets such beautifully clean, crisp product shots for its various devices? Are they real photos at all? Or are they just computer-generated images? The truth is somewhere in between, and shows that Apple’s obsessive attention to detail carries over to everything.

Like most OS X updates before it, with Mountain Lion comes a new default wallpaper. Like Lion, Mountain Lion’s wallpaper keeps with the galaxy theme, but we think this one’s far more beautiful, with a softer blue tone that is quite calming and peaceful to look at. Anyone know which galaxy this is?

Here’s a link to the high-resolution, 3200×2000 pixel wallpaper. You can download the Mountain Lion High-Res Galaxy Default Wallpaper (2.3MB) here.

GateKeeper is one of the big new features in Mountain Lion. It’s designed to protect against malware by limiting what kinds of software gets installed on your Mac. GateKeeper offers Mac users three levels of security: Mac App Store purchases (which have been fully vetted by Apple), Developer ID apps purchased outside the Mac App Store that are digitally signed so your Mac can verify their authenticity via Apple, and apps from all other sources.

The GateKeeper model looks great from the perspective of an individual user or family – easy to understand and use while being fairly effective at leveraging Apple’s developer program as a security solution. How it will stack up in business and enterprise environments, where mass deployment are commonplace, may be a different story.

One of the big marquee features of Mountain Lion is deeply-baked Twitter integration, built right into every Mac apps. If there was any doubt about it after iOS 5, erase it from your mind: after some aborted experiments like Ping, Apple is doubling down on social networking, and the horse they’re backing isn’t Facebook… it’s Twitter.

Imagine yourself at an Apple keynote event. A special, one-off launch for the newest version of Mac OS X. You see the familiar format: Phil Schiller and a couple of other Apple execs run through the successful sales numbers. Then they announce the new product, and then they work their way through a deck of pitch-perfect keynote slides.

It seems familiar, right? Only now imagine that you are alone. This presentation is for one person: you. This bizarro scenario is just what happened to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber last week when Apple briefed him on Mountain Lion.

AirPlay Mirroring is one of the iOS features that Apple is bringing to the Mac in Mountain Lion. It’s a feature that offers a lot of potential for mobile professionals and educators in addition to being a great supplement to a family’s living room.

AirPlay Mirroring works the second generation Apple TV. The Apple TV itself as a small and easy to carry device that can plug into any HDTV or modern projector. That simple setup combined with a Mac running Mountain Lion makes for a perfect portable presentation solution.

Hey, developer kiddies! OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and Mountain Lion server are now available to registered Apple developers over on the official Mac Dev Center. Both are downloaded through the Mac App Store after a redemption coupon.

We’re already at work downloading our copies of Mountain Lion. Keep tuned for Cult of Mac’s first look at the latest version of OS X, coming later today.

In addition to Mountain Lion, Apple is also making a number of other resources available to developers, including guidelines for developing apps for Mountain Lion, GameKit and GLKit programming guides for developing Game Center compatible games, and more. There is also a new version of Xcode, version 4.4, available to program Mountain Lion apps.

Apple’s new version of OS X, 10.8 Mountain Lion, bakes in a lot of new features that may make existing third-party apps obsolete. Notification Center, Reminders, Messages and Twitter all step on the toes of independent developers. And worst of all, these apps come from some of the most popular categories in the App Store.

To explain OS X 10.8’s many incredible new features, Apple has released an official sneak peek at the features you’ll find in Mountain Lion. We’ve embedded it above. Watch it and tell us what you think in the comments!

One of the big threads in the Mountain Lion features that Apple has posted is much deeper integration with iCloud that Lion offers. That isn’t a surprise given Lion began a trend of bringing iOS functionality to the Mac, but it may raise some concerns for Macs in the workplace.

In Mountain Lion, Apple is bringing the iOS document syncing feature to OS X along with Mac versions of the iOS Notes and Reminders apps. There’s also a Mac version of the iOS 5 Notification Center. These are all tremendously valuable features for business users, but the fact that they function by passing business content to Apple’s iCloud servers and onto the devices of employees and their family members is likely to be a big concern for CIOs.

Hey China! Apple loves you. To prove it, there are a whole bunch of China-specific features built into OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook has shared his thoughts on what Mountain Lion means for the future of the Mac, and has hinted Apple may be considering a grand unification of iOS and OS X somewhere down the line.

One of the big headline features in Apple’s new Mountain Lion OS is Gatekeeper, designed to keep malware and other nasties away from your computer. So is this another step towards App Store-only software on Macs?

The short answer is yes, it is. But it doesn’t have to be. Gatekeeper gives you the choice: do you want to stick to App Store-only apps, or be able to install anything from anywhere?

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!

In our review of OS X 10.7, we wrote that Lion was the first great PC operating system of the Post-PC age, and that any future update of OS X would continue to blur the lines between the Mac and the iPad.

Looks like we were more right than we could have imagined. Apple has just apparently announced Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which will make its first appearance as a developer preview today ahead of an official debut this summer.

Apple’s designs constantly prove that beauty and practicality can exist in the same place, but that’s clearly not the only way to do things. Take a look at the AQUA TEK S, which manages to be possibly the most practical and the most ugly iPhone case ever. It bills itself as “the first ever battery powered, solar charged, rugged under water iPhone 4/4S case on Kickstarter.”