Mountain Lion will also feature Gatekeeper, which allows users to control (via settings) the sources from which different apps can be installed. There's also a new feature called Power Nap, which allows your machine to wake itself up to download software updates, iCloud, and back up to Time Machine. That's in addition to improved iCloud support across a number of Apple apps, as well as the ability to use a single sign-in to set up Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime, and Find My Mac. The goal of the release is to bring over many of the successful elements from iOS in order to improve upon the Mac experience-for example, 10.8 includes Mac versions of Notes, Reminders, Game Center, Notification Center, Share Sheets, OS-wide Twitter integration, and AirPlay Mirroring. It has been a seemingly short five months since Apple first went public about OS X Mountain Lion. The release weighs in at 4.05GB and costs a flat $19.99 for the upgrade, so long as your Mac is supported. Apple released OS X 10.8 to the Mac App Store on Wednesday morning, less than a day after announcing its third-quarter earnings- just as we originally predicted.

The app is available for download now (link below) for $10 and will work on Macs running OS X Snow Leopard or Lion.Warm up your broadband connections, because Mountain Lion is now available for public consumption.

It will be interesting to see how AirPlay Mirroring compares in this regard. The app works by encoding your display’s image as H.264 video, then transmitting that to an Apple TV on the same wireless network. It’s essentially a real-time screen capture, which is a clever way of mirroring the display, but it sacrifices image quality due to the data compression required. Also, it won’t allow you to bypass any Apple TV passwords you may have set up but luckily, the developer has promised to fix it all in free future updates. The app lets you stream your computer’s display right to your Apple TV over AirPlay though it currently doesn’t support audio.

AirPlay display mirroring is one of the many new features OS X Mountain Lion will support once it launches this summer but until then, a new app for OS X Snow Leopard and Lion called AirParrot can let you enjoy that feature right now.

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