Apple is taking its OS X release cycle to one major release per year, according to industry writers who got an early review. The company will release OS X 10.8, or "Mountain Lion," this summer, just one year after the release of OS X 10.7, or "Lion."

If you're a member of the Apple Developer Program, you can download a preview of the operating system now.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes that the new OS adds to the connections between OS X and Apple's iOS software, which runs on its mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads, but that the two operating systems are not identical:

Apple sees a fundamental difference between software for the keyboard-and-mouse-pointer Mac and that for the touchscreen iPad. Mountain Lion is not a step towards a single OS that powers both the Mac and iPad, but rather another in a series of steps toward defining a set of shared concepts, styles, and principles between two fundamentally distinct OSes.

Some of the Mountain Lion features that may be familiar to iOS users include Game Center, iMessage, and notifications. It also adds more functionality to Apple's iCloud service.

Another new feature, dubbed "Gatekeeper," is Apple's latest attempt to keep malware off of OS X and may cause some commotion over how much control Apple has over third-party developers. MG Siegler writes at TechCrunch:

Essentially, Gatekepper gives you control over the kind of apps that can be installed on your computer. There will be three options: allow apps from anywhere (the way it works today), allow only Mac App Store apps, allows Mac App Store apps and identified developers.

The reason why this will be controversial is because the final option will be the default one. To be clear: this means that by default, you won’t be able to install any app from the web on your machine.