So after much fanfare Apple have released Mountain Lion a few months back, and many Mac addicts were keen to see what it had on offer. After, reading the reviews of Lion last year I deliberately held back to upgrade my version of Snow Leopard as it seemed Apple had some serious kinks to iron out.
This proved to be a good move, as Mountain Lion bridges the OS gap between your portable Mac devices: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch etc. and there's now a reassuring familiarity with many features and functionaility from the iPhone appearing on this latest OS update. Users making the upgrade will instantly recognise features native to the mobile iOS such as notes, game center plus lots of new features which make this worthy of an upgrade.
There's also integration with FaceTime if you want to see the person you're chatting with. Notifications Center is also a new feature, and can be accessed by swiping from the right corner of the trackpad on a Macbook Pro or Air to the left. Notifications from when you update software, receive new emails/messages and other notifications will appear here. There's also the option to post directly to facebook and twitter which is pretty cool.
Many were expecting to see Siri incorporated into Mountain Lion. Unfortunately, Apple left this out and instead opted for Dictation which uses the inbuilt microphone on your Mac which coverts speech to text. There's good language support for this feature, including Cantonese, Mandarin, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean and German. In true Apple version, they're probably holding off so that people will want to upgrade on the next release.
It would be cool if they introduced a dedicated key for Siri activation on the keyboard.
One of my main frustrations when running OS X was Safari, but even Safari has been given a bit of an upgrade. Gone is the Google search box in the right corner, now users simply go into the address bar and type in the keywords they're searching for and Safari recognizes its a search query and not a web address and returns the Google results.
Tab view has been improved with the trackpad and you can easily swipe between open tabs or pinch to see them all. Apple are also boasting that Safari has the fastest Java Script browsing out there at the moment.
Overall, I'm very impressed with Mountain Lion, and am pleased I skipped the Lion upgrade which many were dissatisfied with.
I'm finding I'm using the trackpad a lot more than I previously did to do all sorts of cool things such as changing view from Apps to my open web page, or to switch between the widgets view and desktop view. You can also play about with web pages and shift the entire frame off view. Easily flicking between your open tabs is definitely another good feature with Safari. For me Mountain Lion is what I expect from a significant OS update, if it could only incorporate Siri it would be the perfect OS.
DragonflyAbout the Guest Author:
Guest Post by Dragonfly a corporate video production in London.