Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review

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.