Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review

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.