In the week since Apple's last developer update of OS X Mountain Lion, several new features including hints of automatic app downloads have been discovered in the next-generation operating system. The discoveries are still continuing, with signs of two new features: offline Reading List mode and iOS-like dictation.

Gear Live highlights the offline reading list option, which is an augmentation of the Safari bookmarking feature that debuted in OS X Lion and syncs saved articles across devices. As noticed by Gear Live, a warning screen in Safari on OS X Mountain Lion indicates that articles saved to Reading List are available for viewing even when the user's Mac is not connected to the Internet.

While troubleshooting a home network issue today, I stumbled upon a new feature that Apple is introducing in OS X Mountain Lion. [...]

When you aren't connected to a network and pull up Safari, you get a message that tells you that you aren't connected to the Internet, but that your "Reading List articles are available for viewing while you are offline."

Meanwhile, 9to5Mac reports that a keyboard shortcut listing in the latest build of OS X Mountain Lion suggests that built-in dictation capabilities will be coming to the Mac. Such capabilities debuted as part of Siri on the iPhone 4S, with only the dictation portion making its way into the third-generation iPad released earlier this year.

According to a resources file inside of the latest build of Safari in the newest seed of the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion, Dictation might be making its way to Macs next. Since Macs do not sport virtual keyboards or physical keyboards with a microphone-labled key, users (by default) will apparently need to simultaneously click both command keys to start voice input.

No other evidence of dictation or other Siri-like features has yet been discovered in OS X Mountain Lion, but Apple continues to work on the next-generation operating system and will undoubtedly issue an extensive preview of it at next month's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

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Apple today pushed out another update to its OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion developer preview program, moving to build 12A206j. The update comes on top of build 12A193i, which was released on May 1.


Apple notes that "MacBookPro3,1", which corresponds to mid and late 2007 machines, is not compatible with the new build, but that issue will be rectified in a later build.

No other details on improvements in the latest build are available yet, but it certainly appears that Apple is making some of its final tweaks for developers leading up to its Worldwide Developers Conference less than four weeks away. Apple is expected to provide extensive previews of OS X Mountain Lion at the conference, with a public launch scheduled for "late summer".

The new Mountain Lion build is still a bit short of the 12A211 build spotted in a Geekbench entry for an apparently unreleased MacBook Pro earlier this week. While that entry could have been faked, the data does match closely with what is known about upcoming Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro models, and Primate Labs believes the entry to be legitimate.

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