The biggest complaint about Lion was, without doubt, the extent to which it was influenced by the iOS. Some referred to Lion as “dumbed down,” because of the changes in the look and (by default) actions of the scroll bars, not to mention Launchpad. What was Apple thinking?

As to public response, Apple reports that 30% of Mac users have upgraded to Lion since the July 2011 release. That’s a faster pace than previous versions of the Mac OS, but you have to factor in the millions of new Macs sold with Lion preloaded. It’s not as if Apple made it easy — or even possible — to downgrade to Snow Leopard. It’s a matter of acceptance more than choice in many cases.

For me, Lion has been a pretty decent upgrade. The disappearing scrollbars are easily made visible 24/7 with a System Preferences setting. You can even restore the direction of scrolling to the traditional Mac way, rather than “in the direction of finger movement” with another preference setting. Two checkboxes, and Lion’s behavior returns to what most of you might prefer. Apple wanted to follow the iOS way, but gave you an out if you wanted one.

Some changes in Mountain Lion aren’t so simple to reverse unless you switch to third-party software.

However, the Notification Manager, for example, can be switched off. While I haven’t tested Growl with Mountain Lion, I suppose there’s no reason why it shouldn’t continue to operate if you prefer its expansive support for apps, other than Apple’s of course.

If you think Gatekeeper is too draconian in attempting to prevent you from opening any app you want, regardless of its source, you only need to select the preference to allow you continue to do things that way. The default appears to be the middle choice, which limits you to software from the Mac App Store, and from developers who have a valid Apple ID certificate. Even there, control-clicking an app’s icon will bypass the warning, which is not repeated, and only applies to stuff you download. If you use an app copied from a USB stick, a DVD, or your local network, Gatekeeper doesn’t get involved.

For Messages, it operates the same way as iChat, with a different and wider message window, while adding iMessages support and other features. So your world doesn’t change. But you can always use AIM, which works quite well on the Mac and does support several different IM schemes.

For contacts, notes, reminders and calendaring, well, it’s Apple or the third-party. If you like the way its done on the iOS, fine. If you don’t, look for a third-party alternative. Nobody forces you to use Apple’s solution.

Mail is not that different in my limited experience with Mountain Lion, so it’s a non-issue to me. If I had a problem with the few changes, I’d be limited in my options, however. I’m not enamored of Thunderbird, and Outlook for the Mac is still underdeveloped and sadly in need of performance improvements and bug fixing. I do hope that the forthcoming Lion-savvy version of Office for the Mac might fix most of the ills, and I also hope it arrives shortly and will be a no-cost update from the existing Office 2011. Microsoft would be wrong to charge you to fix bugs, but it’s not as if they haven’t done that before. Consider the first Mac OS X version that was virtually identical to the previous version other than support for the new OS and a handful of minor feature changes.

Apple’s strategy makes a whole lot of sense to me. They want you to be able to seemlessly move among Apple products, and having apps with the same name and same functions on both the iOS and OS X is a good thing, so long as you don’t lose functionality on the desktop version. That helps both newcomers and existing Apple customers, and it makes it harder for the competition to take customers away. Departing customers have to learn new apps and new skills, which may be an obstacle, although people who don’t like Apple’s products would no doubt be willing to sustain a bit of a learning curve to make that move.

But I do not yet subscribe to the opinion that Apple plans to merge the iOS and OS X in the near future. For now, mobile and desktop computers meet different needs, even if many functions overlap. I cannot, for example, imagine handling my workflow on an iPad, although I realize that might be possible some day. Moving to ARM processors doesn’t make sense either, because Intel chips provide the extra performance that’s essential for many of the things people do on personal computers. The ARM chips will probably get there eventually. But there’s no reason now for Apple to force developers and customers to endure another processor transition in the near future.

My initial exposure to Mountain Lion has been encouraging. I wouldn’t be ready to move my workflow over to a prerelease OS without a lot of careful testing, however. But if all my apps continue to run when 10.8 is released, I’m certainly going to upgrade.

Trying to predict what Apple is going to do is an exercise in total futility. Just as soon as you think you have a handle on their product and marketing strategy, they turn around to upend your assumptions. It has happened often enough that you have to realize it’s all part of a plan you may never understand.

Take those “predictable” Mac OS X upgrades. With Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion, you expected to see the birth of a new feline every couple of years, give or take a few months. It was all clockwork, and your expectations had it that the earliest Apple would disclose the particulars about 10.8 would be the 2012 WWDC, or maybe later.

But Apple had other ideas, and, no, I do not believe that Mountain Lion was designed in response to the perceived potential threat of Windows 8. To me, Windows 8 is little more than the traditional Windows OS with an an ill-conceived tiled overlay. That change could have been accomplished with an add-on, and Microsoft didn’t need to spend billions of dollars to make it happen. Aside from that, and the alleged porting of Windows 8 to ARM processors, I don’t see much meat in Microsoft’s OS plans. It seems to be little more than misdirection rather than OS innovation.

The real question is how developers are greeting Mountain Lion. For those who quickly made their wares Lion friendly, adding Mountain Lion hooks may not be so big a deal. I’m thinking in terms of compatibility with the Notification Manager, for example. A number of third-party programs use an open source tool known as Growl, which puts up similar notification banners, usually on the upper right of your Mac’s display. The message is white on black, same as the Notification Manager counterparts on the iOS and, now, Mountain Lion.

For Growl to work with an app, the developer has to put in the proper hooks, but now that Apple has a system-wide tool offering a similar capability, does that mean that Growl will be “Sherlocked” into nonexistence? And if you’re wondering what I mean by that, well there once was a clever third-party search app, Watson, that was beaten to death by Apple’s version, known as Sherlock. Apple didn’t even attempt to come up with an original name, but Watson soon went bye-bye, and Sherlock morphed into Spotlight.

I suppose the larger question will be whether Growl will be able to coexist with Mountain Lion as developers decide which direction to take, but a system-wide feature is almost always to be preferred if the Mac user is offered similar or better features. For 10.8, the Notification Manager’s setup screens very much resemble their iOS counterparts, as adapted to a desktop OS.

I also have to wonder about developers that, so far, haven’t really embraced Lion and are suddenly confronted with the prospect of having to catch up with yet another OS X upgrade. Perhaps they will just have to consolidate their work, and get it done in one process. But when it comes to such companies as Adobe and Microsoft, we may be looking at 10.9 before anything meaningful happens.

While Adobe’s recent Creative Suite apps do work fine under Lion, at least the ones I’ve tried, they do not support such native features as Auto Save or Versions, and forget about Full Screen Apps. With Mountain Lion, Adobe will have to consider not just the Notification Center, but the enhanced tools for iCloud. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to edit the same InDesign document on all your Macs, moving from desktop to note-book and back again, having the changes appear instantaneously. But that assumes you’re online when the magic happens. Otherwise, if Mountain Lion doesn’t fall back to your local network when you’re offline, you might have to wait for the changes to queue up. This is one of the unanswered questions about the whole thing.

You see, Apple imagines a future in which we are all living in the cloud (and not just the part of our anatomies above the neck). This means relatively swift 24/7 connections, and that’s not a certainly. In the U.S. alone, millions do not have broadband connections. Some don’t want it, many more can’t get it, which means they will have to keep their old fashioned analog telephone modems active all the time, and suffer from those pitifully slow connections many of you have forgotten. At least the local phone companies in those areas will be able to sell you a second line strictly for online use, if you don’t already have one.

I’m also more or less certain that Gatekeeper, meant to keep you from opening a possibly malware-ridden app, is yet another subtle gesture to coerce developers to put their stuff in the Mac App Store. However, there are apps that aren’t suitable now, and may never be suitable for such placement. Some of those apps tap system resources to, for example, capture both sides of a Skype conversation. Others have intense and sophisticated installers that throw files hither and yon on your hard drive. Neither would get to first base in the Mac App Store.

But if Apple were to work with developers to help them simplify those convoluted installations, and provide hooks to allow apps and the OS to talk to each other to allow recording from other apps and other functions to safely happen within a sandboxed environment, maybe it won’t matter.

Meantime, Mountain Lion may be both a threat and a promise to developers as they continue to try to embrace Apple’s OS future of major annual upgrades.

Except for the members of the media who received copies of Mountain Lion ahead of the Thursday launch, few suspected that Apple would get out another Mac OS X upgrade so quickly. After all, to some at any rate, Lion still needs work. Why would Apple rush headlong into completing a successor?

Well, Apple isn’t about to follow anyone’s conventional wisdom, and maybe it’s true that the arrival of Windows 8 later this year, with integration between desktops and tablets, might have spurred Apple on. Or maybe not, because Mountain Lion seems such a natural progression from Lion that it’s hard to believe that it was somehow rushed.

With Lion, Apple got attacked rather severely in some quarters for somewhat clumsily moving iOS features into the Mac OS. In particular Launcher, which provides a display of your apps that closely resembles the iOS version, comes across as one large miss. Reverse scrolling, though it can be turned back to the traditional Mac (and Windows) method via a simple preference checkbox, didn’t earn Apple many plaudits either.

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Apple continues to defy conventional wisdom. On Thursday morning, just when Mac users were still getting accustomed to OS 10.7 Lion, Apple unleashed yet another cat, OS 10.8 Mountain Lion. But unlike previous versions of Mac OS X — which is now officially OS X (Mac is not in the versioning or branding of the new OS) — there was no special media event to herald the forthcoming release.

Instead, Apple installed pre-release versions of Mountain Lion onto MacBook Airs and judiciously distributed them to certain members of the media, with the proviso that they not reveal any information until Thursday’s announcement. Tim Cook also gave an interview opportunity to the Wall Street Journal. Quite a difference from the way such releases were handled in the recent past under the leadership of Steve Jobs.

Yes, there has already been plenty of coverage about all the nooks and crannies of Mountain Lion and, of course, you can take a quick tour at Apple’s site. But much of what you’ll see can be summed up in a single phrase: the iOS-ification of the Mac continues. Take out an iPad running iOS 5 and you’ll see most of the major features Apple has revealed. There will be others of course, to fulfill the promise of 100 plus.

For example, Messages replaces iChat, combining the previous features of the venerable OS X app, FaceTime support, and integration with the iMessages texting feature from iOS 5. A renamed Contacts app replaces Address Book, and you will use Reminders rather than iCal to send yourself and your contacts alerts about events and meetings.

One feature that might be a tad controversial for developers is Gatekeeper. It’s part of the new Security & Privacy preference pane, and affords extra protection against the most common — and one of the few — types of Mac malware these days, the Trojan Horse app. There will be two settings to keep you from downloading one of those things by mistake and perhaps compromising your Mac. The first limits the installation and opening of apps to those you download from the Mac App Store. The second, which appears to be the default, adds an “identified developers” category. This one requires that developers, when signing up for Apple’s developer program, apply for a developer ID, which creates a certificate that becomes part of their apps. If the app contains malware, the certificate can be revoked and the developer drummed out of the program. If that certificate isn’t present, or is no longer in effect, the app won’t open unless you follow a bypass feature I’ll get too shortly. The third option lets you run any app, same as now.

According to published reports, protection is limited to the initial installation and first launch. If right or control-click the app, you’ll be able to open or install ones that would otherwise be blocked. From there on, those apps will run without any further interruption. But I wonder how this security scheme will work if you’re not online and Apple’s servers can’t be contacted to identify a valid developer certificate.

All in all, Gatekeeper seems to be a good idea, though I suspect developers who keep their apps on their own sites and not in the Mac App Store — often because Apple won’t accept apps with complex installations or which modify system capabilities — may feel left out. They will, at the very least, want to make sure they get that developer ID and update their apps accordingly. Otherwise Mac users, particularly those new to the platform, may never discover those treasures, or abandon them when they don’t install or open without an extra step. I suppose we’ll have to see how it all works out.

There’s also a new Notification Center that’s extremely close to the iOS counterpart. It will provide notices of events, messages, email and so on evidently on the upper right of your Mac’s display. A System Preferences option will let you configure Notification Center separately for each supported app, again in the same way that it’s done in the iOS. Since Apple will provide APIs for developers to add many Mountain Lion features, you have to wonder the fate of Growl, a third-party notification manager that’s currently supported by loads of third-party apps.

The Mountain Lion Game Center will allow you to share your gaming experience with friends and across Apple products. Over time, you will also likely see larger numbers of iOS games being ported to the Mac, which means you can start a game on your iPad, continue playing in your iPhone, and get to the finish line on your Mac. The Mac version of Game Center may indeed be the magic bullet to really grow the gaming market on the platform.

There will be system-wide integration with Twitter, an enhanced iCloud with document sharing capabilities, and a lot more goodies. I suppose people who have ranted about Lion and the initial foray into iOS integration won’t be impressed, but since you’ll still be able to do most things on your Mac in the same fashion as you can now — except for the revised Apple apps of course — I fail to see that as a huge problem. Well, except for all those developers, such as Adobe and Microsoft, who still still haven’t released Lion savvy stuff.

Mountain Lion is scheduled for release in the “late summer,” and will be available as a download from the Mac App Store. While the price wasn’t announced, I’d be surprised to see Apple changing the current $29.99 rate. And, of course, you won’t get a cheap upgrade from Lion. Apple doesn’t do that.

Now some might suggest Apple rushed Mountain Lion to trump Microsoft and the promised integration of Windows 8 with desktop PCs and tablets. But it may be part of a larger goal, which is to resume annual OS X upgrades. That will certainly keep developers busy, and you can expect that the differences between the Mac and the iOS will continue to lessen.

I do wonder whether Mac OS 11 will move away from feline names and maybe focus on another animal. Canines perhaps? How about OS XI Bulldog?