ITWire

At last month's WWDC, Apple firmed up its plans for a northern summer debut for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion by revealing plans to ship in July.

We're almost into the middle third of the month, and the latest word that a 'golden master' (normally the last iteration before general availability) of the new operating system - and its corresponding server add-on - have been made available to developers.

Mountain Lion will be priced at $20.99 (slightly less than the US price once GST is taken into account). Mountain Lion Server is an additional $20.99 purchase.

Like Lion, Mountain Lion will be offered as a download from the Mac App Store. There's no indication at this stage when or if it will be available on physical media.

The golden master is reportedly a 4.34GB download, which will be a consideration for some would-be users, especially those on low-volume wireless broadband plans.

Among the features of Mountain Lion that Apple is trumpeting are Dictation (talk wherever you can type), Messages (an iChat replacement that provides compatibility with the iOS Messages app), a focus on sharing via social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc), and Gatekeeper (to help verify the provenance of downloaded software).

Users of recent MacBook Airs or the MacBook Pro with Retina display may benefit from Power Nap, which automatically refreshes Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Photo Stream, Find My Mac and Documents in the Cloud, and when plugged in, downloads software updates and backs up the Mac using Time Machine, all while the computer is sleeping.

We don't know exactly when Mountain Lion will arrive, but one rumour says it will be July 24.