Back in June Apple announced that it will roll out Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to the Mac App Store this July, but did not provide an exact date for the release. On Tuesday, July 25th, Apple released the operating system to its Mac App Store. For the low price of $19.99 you can upgrade to the 9th major release of Apple’s operating system. Or to put it in other words, for twenty bucks you can upgrade from Snow Leopard or Lion to the newly released Mountain Lion operating system.

"People are going to love the new features in Mountain Lion and how easy it is to download and install from the Mac App Store," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "With iCloud integration, Mountain Lion is even easier to set up, and your important information stays up to date across all your devices so you can keep editing documents, taking notes, creating reminders, and continue conversations whether you started on a Mac, iPhone or iPad."

As Apple explained, Mountain Lion comes with some 200 innovative new features. These include the following:

• iCloud integration – by using your iCloud account the operating system makes it easy to set up Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, and Notes.
• Messages – a brand new app that replaces iChat. With this app you can send messages, photos and videos from one Mac to another. Messages provides support for AIM, Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger and Google. A beta version of Messages is available for download on apple.com right now; the final version will be incorporated into Mountain Lion.
• Reminders and Notes – these are tools you can use to create and track to-dos across multiple devices.
• Game Center – assuming you’re not familiar with Game Center, it helps you find new games, challenge friends, and play live multiplayer games.
• Notification Center – displays notifications from Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, system updates and third party apps.
• System-wide Sharing – easily share links, photos, videos, and other files.
• Twitter and Facebook integration – the popular micro-blogging site and the social networking site are integrated throughout Mountain Lion.
• AirPlay Mirroring - wirelessly send a secure 720p video stream from your Mac to an HDTV via Apple TV.
• Gatekeeper – a new security feature that helps you control which apps can be downloaded and installed on your machine.
• Dictation - dictation is built into the operation system.
• A faster Safari browser.

Additional information on what Mountain Lion has to offer is available here.
Mountain Lion is available for purchase on the Mac App Store for $19.99 – here’s the link.