Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review

One of the key things about Apple’s products is the level of interaction between them, such as being able to send content from your iPad to your Apple TV. While the mobile devices have been very good at this, OS X has lagged behind a little. With Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple is redressing the balance, with a raft of changes designed to make working across all of your Apple devices easier.

As with recent products, iCloud is key to a lot of the integration, providing the online storage and synchronisation technology.

ICLOUD

Apple’s iCloud now sits at the Center of operating system, directly integrated into it. One of the key changes is that some built-in apps can now save files directly to iCloud, so you can access and edit them from other iCloud-connected devices.

TextEdit and Preview are the main apps to get this feature. When you first start either app, you see a list of documents stored in your cloud storage. You can also drag-and-drop old documents into this dialog box to add these files to your iCloud storage. This counts as moving the document, so the original is removed from your computer.

TextEdit and Preview now have their own section of iCloud storage, and you can drag-and-drop old files into the cloud

From both TextEdit and Preview you can now also save files directly to iCloud, bypassing having to use your local storage at all. It works incredibly smoothly and quickly.

It’s far from perfect, though, and Apple hasn’t provided any application to browse all of your online documents, leaving TextEdit and Preview with their own separate areas of iCloud. So, if you want to find a specific file, you first have to open the application you saved it in. There’s also no way to organise files into Folders, which is annoying once you’ve got a big collection of documents.

Any file can be uploaded into iCloud, but the level of success varies. For example, if you put an image file into TextEdit’s iCloud, opening the picture opens the raw code; doing the same thing using Preview means that the file opens correctly.

For us, what iCloud is really missing is a way to synchronise documents and files regardless of the application they were created in, while providing a simple way to browse your entire iCloud data store.

With that in mind we think a dedicated file synchronisation and backup service makes more sense for most people, such as the excellent SugarSync.

REMINDERS AND NOTES

OS X has always had Reminders and Notes, but they were part of iCal and Mail respectively. With Mountain Lion, Reminders and Notes now get their own applications.

It’s a good move, particularly if you’re using alternatives to iCal and Mail, such as webmail or Outlook 2011, as you can now share your Reminders and Notes between your OS X and iOS devices.

Notes works in much the same way as the iOS version, giving you a simple application for jotting down small bits of information.

Notes is now a standalone application, which works in the same way as the iOS version

Reminders synchronises with those that you’ve made on your iOS devices, but the new version also lets you set locations, so you’re only notified when leaving or arriving at a destination.

Reminders has been pulled out of iCal and is now a standalone app

Reminders will automatically look up your home and work addresses, provided they’re entered into the Contacts app. You can also type in the name of a contact, to automatically fill in their address, or simply type an address in directly.

It’s fair to say that neither application is particularly revolutionary, but spinning them off as their own distinct programs makes a lot of sense and makes them easier to find.

NOTIFICATION CENTER

Notification Center is a feature straight out of iOS, which will be familiar to anyone that’s got an iPhone or iPad. It’s designed to host all of your notifications, from new mail and mail messages, to updates from the App Store.

There’s a dedicated button to make it pop-out of the right-hand-side of the screen, but you can also swipe with two-fingers from right-to-left on a touchpad. Third-party applications are allowed to plug into Notification Center, giving a single place in OS X to get updates and messages.

Notification Center is a feature straight out of iOS and is a single place for updates and alerts to appear

A Settings button lets you configure exactly how you want each integrated application to display its notifications, including None, Banners that appear on screen and disappear automatically, and Alerts that stay on screen until dealt with.

You can configure each application’s Notification Center preferences and choose how the alerts are displayed

It’s not quite that easy, as each application can also have its own Notification Center settings. Take Mail, for example, which lets you choose which emails you should be notified about – Inbox, those people on your VIP list, anyone in your Contacts or everything.

Each application can also contain its own Notification Center preferences

Scrolling to the top of Notification Center gives you a switch to turn off alerts. The setting automatically turns on the next day, just in case you forget to turn switch it back on.

Having everything integrated into one place is a neat way to keep on top of everything, but we think that the full range of options should be available from the settings menu.

TWITTER

Apple wants Notification Center to be the home of all of your social networking, too. The much vaunted Facebook integration will come in an update later in the year, but for now there’s full Twitter support.

Provided you add your Twitter account to Mail, Contacts and Calendars, you’ll get alerts in Notification Center. There’s also an optional Tweet button, you can send updates directly from Notification Center.

It’s not a full Twitter client by any means, though, and it doesn’t let you view the feed from the people that you’re following.

SHARE

Sharing content is one of the big things that the internet and social networking has given us and now Apple integrates this into the heart of the OS. A wide range of applications now have a Share button, so you can send what you’re looking at to other people, including via Email, Messages and Twitter.

So far only Apple’s applications have this built in, so you can share from Safari, for example, but not from Google Chrome. This should change as more developers take advantage of the technology.

The Share button appears on most Apple products and is a quick way to send content to a friend

In the meantime, Share is still an invaluable feature. It doesn’t let you do anything that you couldn’t do before, but it’s considerably easier and more convenient.

IMESSAGE

On its iOS devices, iMessage is an SMS replacement using Wi-Fi. This didn’t make a huge amount of sense standalone, but with OS X Mountain Lion the point is starting to become more obvious.

With the new Messages app in Mountain Lion, you can now converse instantly with iOS and other OS X iMessage devices instantly. As well as simply conversing, you can drag and drop pictures, videos and files into conversations sharing files up to 100MB. Messages can take a while to be delivered and iMessage wasn’t as fast as using a dedicated IM application.

Messages brings iMessage support to OS X, so you converse with your iOS friends

How useful you find it really depends on how many people you know with an Apple device and iMessage enabled. We’d have liked Messages to support other more-popular IM services, including Google Talk and Windows Live Messenger.

DICTATION

Although voice control and dictation has been part of iOS for a while, the technology is just making it into OS X Mountain Lion now. Just tap Fn twice to bring up the speech box, talk what you want say and then hit the Done button.

The quality of the technology isn’t too bad, but we spotted a fair few mistakes in the sentences that we dictated. Reading the previous sentence aloud using our MacBook Air’s built-in microphone, we got: “Was this technology isn’t too bad, but was for the first 2010 week.”

We’ve yet to be impressed enough by a dictation system to move away from a keyboard and we see nothing in OS X Mountain Lion to change that now.

SAFARI

Apple’s browser has had a few minor updates to it. We like the new Reading List. Any sites that you save to this list are automatically downloaded so that you can read them offline at a later date. It will even look to see if the article is split into multiple pages, downloading the entire article.

It also keeps track of what you have and haven’t read, making it a quick way to keep up with your internet reading. InstaPaper still has more features, but Reading List is a decent alternative for light use.

Reading List lets you save web pages for offline use, which could be handy if you’re going offline and want to keep up with your reading

Safari now has iCloud integration in it, letting you view the tabs that are open on one computer on another. The idea is that you can pick up your browsing when you move from one device to another. This feature will make it into iOS 6 when it’s released later this year, with the ability to switch from a desktop to a mobile device a lot more compelling.

Apple has added a new graphical way of switching between open windows, called Tab View. It lets you you swipe between thumbnails all of your open tabs. It’s smooth, but you can only see on screen at once the current tab and a sliver of the previous and next ones. If you’ve got a lot of tabs open, this view’s not particularly useful. We would have preferred tabs to be included in Application Expose instead.

Tab View looks great and is really smooth, but we think it’s of limited use.

It’s good to see Apple add these new features to Safari, but given the brilliant multi-platform synchronisation built into Chrome, we still prefer Google’s browser.

POWER NAP

Intel-based ultra-books have had the ability to wake themselves periodically to check for new email and other updates since launch and it’s been the one area where Apple has lagged behind.

No longer, as Apple now has Power Nap. Requiring a firmware update, Power Nap lets your computer wake itself periodically, without turning on any lights, the screen or playing any notification sounds.

What it can do depends on the mode. On Battery power your computer can check for new email, calendar and other iCloud updates. When plugged into the mains, your computer can do all of this and perform a Time Machine backup.

Power Nap is a handy way to keep your computer up-to-date and backed up without having to stand over it to keep it powered on

It’s a great way to make sure that your computer’s always up-to-date and always backed up, but it’s limited to Apple’s apps at the moment. It would be good to see other application support, such as Outlook.

GATEKEEPER

Security is something that Apple’s recently had to take more seriously, and with Mountain Lion it has added Gatekeeper. It’s a simple utility that lets you control where applications can be installed from.

The harshest setting lets you install applications from the App Store only, the next setting lets you also install applications from trusted developers, while the weakest setting turns off all checks.

Gatekeeper lets you restrict where apps are installed from as an additional security check

It’s nice to see Apple putting more security into its operating system, but there’s no guarantee that any application you install isn’t infected, while the settings are fairly easy to override.

EXPOSE MISSION CONTROL

One of the more controversial changes of OS X 10.7 Lion was that it switched the traditional Expose view for Mission Control. While Expose let you view every open window as a thumbnail, Mission Control organised windows by application. To make up for this Application Expose was introduced, letting you just view the windows that belong to a single application.

You can change how Mission Control works, so it’s more like the Expose of old

With OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion there’s now an option to turn of Group by Applications for Mission Control, which essentially turns it back into Expose. It’s a little tweak, but one that fans of Expose will be pleased with.

FINDER

Finder remains roughly the same. The most noticeable difference is that when copying files and folders, each one now has its own status bar, so you can tell when it’s finished copying. This status bar is shown both in the Finder Window and, on the Desktop, on the icon of the folder or files that you’re copying.

Not strictly a Finder update, but closely related, is the option to change the name of file by clicking a window’s title bar. This feature only works on supported applications, but it’s a godsend for those times you accidentally type the wrong file name and have to close the app, find the file in Finder and make the change there.

The ability to rename files from the title bar is really useful.

AIRPLAY MIRRORING

AirPlay Mirroring lets you stream the picture and sound from your Mac to an Apple TV. If there’s an Apple TV on the network a new icon appears in the Menu Bar.

AirPlay mirroring lets you send your computer’s screen and sound to an Apple TV. There’s a slight delay, but it’s good for videos or presentations.

You can choose to replicate your computer’s screen or set it to match the Apple TV’s resolution (720p for the original and 1080p for the new Apple TV). Make sure that you turn off Overscan in Display Preferences, or you could end up with a black frame around the picture.

If you’re sending your screen to a TV, check the Overscan option is turned off, or you could end up with a black frame round the picture

Getting your Mac on to the Apple TV is very easy, but it’s not particularly responsive with a noticeable lag between actions on the computer and the response on your television.

Sound is also slightly delayed, which makes sense, as you can play videos from your Mac to your TV with proper lip synching. Otherwise, AirPlay mirroring is fine for showing off some pictures or running a presentation but not much else.

You can also choose just to output your audio from the Mac to an AirPlay device, which is handy if you want to play your iTunes music collection or Spotify through AirPlay speakers.

TIME MACHINE

Time Machine has always been a great way to keep your Mac backed up, but it’s always been limited to a single destination. With Mountain Lion, Apple now allows you to backup to multiple disks, say at home and at work.

The immediate benefit is that if you have a fault in your computer, you shouldn’t be too far away from a full backup.

BROKEN APPS

Of course every update also breaks something that worked in the previous version of the OS. The windows management software X11 has now been removed from the system, but Apple at least points you to a replacement for this for any software that requires it, such as The GIMP and Mplayer.

Some libraries have been moved and altered, too, breaking compatibility with old applications. For example, the open source image editing software, ImageMagick, no longer works with Mountain Lion. There are workarounds provided you’re willing to compile your own version of the software.

Problems for most people are few and far between, though, as most commercial applications have been updated to work with the new OS. In fact, the only problem we had was with Parallels, although that was because we hadn’t updated that software before performing the upgrade to Mountain Lion.

VERDICT

There are a lot of neat new features built into OS X and we applaud Apple’s use of the cloud and simple sharing of data between all of your Apple devices. It’s not perfect, though, and the document organisation and sharing of iCloud really needs some work – a full synchronisation service for all documents would be our preference.

Ultimately, it’s hard to knock the price of this update, costing £14 for anyone with Snow Leopard or Lion. As the update runs from the Apple App Store, anyone running a version older than Snow Leopard will first have to pay to upgrade to this version (DVDs are available online for around £25).

Given how cheap it is and the improvements it offers, anyone running Snow Leopard or Lion should upgrade now.