The Verge interviewed Chris Forsythe, the man behind Growl. Chris shared a bit about the history of Growl, its transition to the Mac App Store, and more.

Dr. Drang:

I tried to use LaunchBar this morning to start up a Messages session. I hit my LB hotkey, Control-Space, and typed “mess,” figuring that Messages would be one of the top hits and that by choosing it from the list, I would teach LaunchBar to select it first. But Messages wasn’t near the top of the list; it wasn’t in the list at all.

I assumed that LaunchBar hadn’t indexed the Applications folder since I installed Messages (even though I have it set up to index every time the contents of the folder changes), so I told it to reindex and tried to launch Messages via “mess” again. Still not in the hit list.

Ditto. Though the extent of my nerdy tech investigating consisted of rebooting my Air to see if that would help (it didn’t).

Episode 47 of The B&B Podcast. Ben and I talk mostly about Mountain Lion and the new Messages beta app. What else would you expect?

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Chris Bowler on how your dream job can have a negative impact on your work/life balance and keep you from pursuing additional hobbies and being present in your relationships:

When you do what you love, it can often lead to being all that you do. It’s what you think about when you wake up, when you’re in the shower, in the moments of peace and quiet, and as you close your eyes at the end of the day.

Patrick Lenz proves that running an SSD over Thunderbolt as your main boot drive is as fast, if not faster, than having an internal SSD:

When I had everything wired up to one of the two Thunderbolt ports of my iMac, I fired up the Black Magic Disk Speed Test and got quite satisfactory results of 250MB/s write speed and 480MB/s read speed, respectively. My Late 2010 MacBook Air, by comparison, clocks in at roughly 100MB/s write and 140MB/s read speed on its internal SSD.

Lenz’s Thunderbolt drive also gets faster read/write speeds than my mid-2011 specced-out MacBook Air (which gets speeds of 230MB/s and 210MB/s respectively).

Steven Frank:

Today’s Mountain Lion announcement introduces an important new security feature, called Gatekeeper, in addition to the “sandboxing” feature that premiered in Lion. I’d like to talk a little bit about it, and why it’s important to all Mac users.

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Well, when you put it that way.

Jason Snell with more info on Gatekeeper and how it works.

It’s clear that Gatekeeper in Mountain Lion isn’t intended to be some sort of high-security app lockdown. It’s just a tool to encourage people not to run software they don’t trust. If they really, truly want to run an app, Mountain Lion won’t stop them.

Gatekeeper also strikes me as a way to continue to build support for the Mac App Store. Apple is telling users that 3rd-party apps bought from the Mac App Store apps are the most safe.

And, Apple is pushing support for the Mac App Store from the other direction as well. John Gruber points out that some of the best new features in Mountain Lion will only be available to Mac App Store apps:

Two big ones: iCloud document storage and Notification Center. Both of these are slated only for third-party apps from the Mac App Store. Many developers, though, have been maintaining non-Mac App Store versions of their apps. If this continues, such apps are going to lose feature parity between the App Store and non-App Store versions. Apple is not taking the Mac in iOS’s “all apps must come through the App Store” direction, but they’re certainly encouraging developers to go Mac App Store-only with iCloud features that are only available to Mac App Store apps (and, thus, which have gone through the App Store approval process).

Nilay Patel also has a good overview of Mountain Lion for The Verge, and a includes a good video overview as well.

Regarding Gatekeeper, and what the default is for what apps you can install:

Mountain Lion will ship out of the box restricted to running only signed apps and apps from the Mac App Store. (You can still run any app you want by right-clicking on an unsigned app or simply changing the global setting to allow apps from anywhere. You can also lock things down even tighter and only allow App Store apps to run.

As always, a great overview by Jason Snell.

Earlier this month, John Gruber, along with several other journalists and writers, each were invited to private, one-on-one meetings with Apple to be shown Mountain Lion. John’s account is fascinating. Surely this is the one of most eyebrow-raising, head-tilting product announcements in Apple’s history.

Just about nobody was expecting this today. I certainly wasn’t. When I started seeing Jim Dalrymple and Jason Snell linking to their Mountain Lion articles via Twitter this morning I thought it was a joke. But, it’s not. And, in hindsight, Mountain Lion makes a lot of sense. As OS X continues to get merged with iOS, why not put it on a one-year development cycle as well? I wonder what this will mean for iMacs and MacBook Airs/Pros?

If you don’t have it already, here’s the download link for the new iChat app we all knew was coming sooner or later. For the record I like the new icon, even though it is blue. What I don’t like is having my iPhone and iPad buzz while I’m carrying on a conversation in Messages on my Mac.