During the WWDC 2013 Keynote, Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi took the stage to introduce the tenth version of the popular OS X. Apple moved away from the common naming theme of cats, and released the brand new OS X Mavericks.

Apple’s WWDC 2013 event is set to kick off early this Monday at 10:00am with one of the company’s widely popular keynotes. During this keynote, Apple CEO Tim Cook and several other executives will introduce the next major releases of iOS and OS X. In preparation for the event, Apple began to dress up Moscone West (where the event will be held) with signs and banners describing the products to be released.

After months in beta, Apple has finally released the OS X 10.8.4 update for Mountain Lion. The OS X update is available now for download via the Mac App Store, and brings major improvements throughout Mountain Lion, including Wi-Fi connectivity and Microsoft Exchange compatibility, Safari bug fixes, a fix for an issue that prevented users from making FaceTime calls to non-U.S. numbers, and other enhancements.

Speculation is that Apple is preparing to update the core design and key functionality of OS X 10.9, making necessary software enhancements and improvements geared towards “power users.” Amongst those new features are a new version of Safari and improvements on how users multitask on a Mac.

Apple has unveiled their next software update for Mountain Lion, as the OS X 10.8.4 beta has been pushed to developers registered in Apple’s developer program. This developer build is labeled 12E30, and Apple has requested that developers focus on graphics, drivers, Safari, and WiFi.

While it would be great if Apple actually could rehabilitate and restore the prestige of the cougar name (which I rather like) from prurient connotations and reclaim the higher ground, I have to disagree with my friend, The Mac Observer’s John Martellaro, who contends there would be no problem in Apple, naming OS X 10.9 “Cougar.”

Apple has released OS X 10.8.3, the latest update for Mountain Lion, which also includes Safari 6.0.3. In addition to bug and security fixes, it includes the ability to scan an iTunes card using your laptop’s camera instead of manually entering the code.

Consensus is gelling that OS X Lynx (one of the major wild feline names as yet not applied to an OS X version) will be the name for OS X v10.9. It remains to be seen whether consensus is correct, but I hope it is. Strictly speaking, there are 36 wild cat species, leaving some 35 names as yet unused by Apple, but most are pretty obscure. Lynx, however, is a more than worthy candidate, indeed one of my favorite big cats.

A friend of mine—a longtime and formerly ultra-enthusiastic Mac fan—recently summed up his frustration with the direction Apple has taken. He still uses Apple computers because, he says, he’s too lazy to learn a new system, but he detests the “ecosystem” model Apple has constructed around the iOS and, increasingly, OS X as well.

One big difference between Mac and Windows users, especially over the past dozen years, has been the proportion of Mac-users willing to (and even enthusiastically) stay upgraded to the latest version of Apple’s desktop operating system. This was true even back in the days when full version upgrades cost $129.95 as opposed to $19.95 for the current cutting edge OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Brad Miser’s new “Teach Yourself Visually MacBook Pro” is something a bit different from the mainstream, and in a good way. Instead of following the usual formula of mainly descriptive text supported by screenshots, photos, and graphics, the book’s central theme is its pictorial and graphic material, with just a short, descriptive paragraph or two introducing each topic, then letting the pictures tell the story supported by bulleted point captioning.

Based on recent precedent, we can reasonably anticipate Apple will be releasing OS X v10.9 sometime in 2013, probably before fall, with beta builds likely to begin surfacing soon. Apple has already used pretty much all of the major big cat names for the first eight full version revisions of OS X, so 10.9 will be called poses a conundrum for those of us who care about such matters.