OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 Review (1 of 2)

By Brian Heater

A lot has changed since early 2001. We've got a new president approaching the end of his first term, the US has embarked on two major wars and the words "Lady Gaga" have become much more than just gibberish. Some things, however, don't change. In nearly each of these intervening years, Apple has issued a major update to its desktop operating system, OS X. This time last year, the company issued OS 10.7 Lion, a king-of-the-jungle moniker many thought would mark the end of Apple's big cat naming scheme and, by extension, the OS X lineage. In February, however, the old operating system showed she still had some life left in her, when the next edition was revealed, arriving over the summer and called Mountain Lion.

Based on the name alone, you'd think 10.8 would be a modest improvement over its predecessor -- not unlike the baby step between Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6). But Apple insists that this latest build is more than just a seasonal refresh -- in all, it boasts more than 200 new features. Some are major, including things like a new Notification Center, AirPlay Mirroring and a desktop version of Messages. Others, such as full-screen mode for Notes... not so much. What seems to unite the vast majority of the 200 features, however, is a nod to iOS. So, how easily can Mac users justify that $20 download? Follow along after the break, as we put those 200 features to the test.

Mountain Lion Review

Table of contents

• Upgrading
• Finder
• AirPlay mirroring
• Sharing button
• Notification Center
• Messages
• Mail and Contacts
• Calendar and Reminders
• Safari
• iCloud
• Auto Save, TextEdit and Notes
• Dictation

• Mac App Store and Game Center
• Gatekeeper and Security
• Dashboard and Launchpad
• Accessibility
• Power Nap
• Preview
• Features for the Chinese market
• System
• Performance
• Odds and ends
• Wrap-up

---

[Table of contents]

Upgrading

Upgrading to Mountain Lion couldn't be easier -- assuming you have the kind of internet connection that can reasonably handle a 4.34GB download. If you don't, well, you may want to look into spending a morning at your nearest Starbucks. Apple won't be releasing the software on a USB stick like it did last time, so downloading from the Mac App Store is your only option. If you previously made the jump to Lion courtesy of a downloaded update, you should be quite familiar with what goes on here. It's a simple sequence of waiting for the download, sitting through a few reboots and then, presto, you have a new OS. We ran the upgrade on a late-2010 MacBook Air with a Core 2 Duo processor and the install process took just over 30 minutes. Faster machines will likely chew through the installation code more quickly.

[Table of contents]

Finder

Twin galaxies: A Mountain Lion desktop, left; Lion, right

OS X reached its 10th anniversary last year. When it was first introduced in 2001, the operating system was something of a revolution, surpassing its predecessor and, arguably, what was then the most current version of Windows. In the past 10 years, Apple's desktop OS has seen its share of changes, with a major point upgrade coming nearly every year. With the release of Lion 12 months ago, many suspected the company had issued the final installment in the OS X story, but Apple had at least one more up its sleeve. With that in mind, it's no surprise that Mountain Lion bears more than a passing resemblance to its similarly named predecessor. In fact, out of the box, the only striking difference between 10.7 and 10.8's respective desktops is a new default wallpaper. (Clearly, Apple wasn't through with its celestial theme.) As with Lion, hard disks and other drives won't show up on the desktop by default, but you can easily adjust that in Preferences.

Though Apple crammed more than 200 features into its latest OS, these upgrades don't include any significant changes to the overall look and feel -- certainly, it's nothing like the transition from Win7 to Windows 8, which will also be released within the coming months. That said, the Finder has gotten a bit of a facelift. First up is the introduction of an inline progress indicator for file transfers from a drive or server -- one of many features borrowed from iOS. In addition to the traditional progress window that pops up in the middle of the screen, a small white bar is overlaid on top of a grayed-out file icon, letting you know how much of the transfer is left. A big "X" also pops up on top in the upper-left corner, if you get cold feet about moving files back and forth.

Addressing a complaint in 10.7, Apple has made the sidebars in Finder windows a bit more customizable, so that drag-and-drop functionality now includes categories. In other words, you can pick up and reorder things like Favorites, Shared and Devices to suit your quick-selecting needs. Another handy addition is the ability to encrypt files from the comfort of the Finder sidebar -- just highlight a drive and either click Control or give a two-fingered tap to the right side of the trackpad to protect it from prying eyes. Enter a password twice followed by a hint and your machine will start encrypting.

If you thought Apple had already used up every possible swipe and tap combination, boy have we got the one-handed gesture for you -- tap three fingers on a file or folder, and you'll get a preview window, offering up an icon, the name of the file, its version and size and an option for opening it. In the case of multimedia files such as movies, you can hit play without launching a separate program. Once that window is open, you can preview other apps by highlighting them with the cursor, which should prove a boon for people who prefer large icons. Like the Finder windows, the Preview also features the new share button, a near-ubiquitous addition to Mountain Lion that allows you to transfer files through a variety of methods, tailored to different apps. These include email, Message and AirDrop.

[Table of contents]

AirPlay mirroring

Here at Engadget HQ, there's no single Mountain Lion feature we're more excited about than AirPlay mirroring. It worked on the iPad, so why not bring it over to OS X? Using an Apple TV, you can beam movies and other content from your computer to an HDTV at up to 1080p. The setup couldn't be more straightforward -- get your system and Apple TV on the same wireless network and the AirPlay logo will pop up in the right-hand corner of your desktop. Select Apple TV from the drop-down menu and it will start to glow blue. You can then chose to have the system either scale to match the resolution of your desktop or just fit it to the TV.

Mirroring works with iTunes, of course, switching to full-screen automatically. We used it to watch some movies on Hulu, mirroring both the video and the full system output (if you do that, you'll want to silence everything else that's going on). We noticed less than a second of lag -- not a problem for videos, but it could be an issue if you plan on using your TV to play Game Center titles. Otherwise, it's a seamless experience with one major oversight: some serious hardware limitations. We attempted to do some mirroring using our two-year-old MacBook Air, but couldn't quite accomplish the task. In order to take advantage of the feature, you'll need one of the following devices:

• iMac (mid-2011 or newer)

• Mac mini (mid-2011 or newer)

• MacBook Air (mid-2011 or newer)

• MacBook Pro (Early 2011 or newer)

Whatever you own, you'll also need a second-generation Apple TV or a newer model.

[Table of contents]

Sharing button

You can run, but you can't hide from the Share button. Apple's integrated this feature into just about every first-party app in Mountain Lion. Cupertino clearly knows how devoted you, the Mac user, are to the various social networks in your life, and it wants to save you a few extra steps when it comes sharing content. Notably, these sharing options include a number of third-party services, including Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr and Facebook (in beta until later this year).

And while Apple's not going out of its way to highlight a certain Mountain View-based company -- it programmed a Safari bookmark for Yahoo, of all things, but not Google -- YouTube is included as a sharing option in QuickTime. (Interestingly, this doesn't apply when a QuickTime file is highlighted in the Finder, for some reason.) Apple's done a good job tailoring sharing to different services -- Finder, for example, just offers up email, Message and AirDrop, while Preview includes all those options, plus Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and iPhoto. It's hard not to note certain oversights with regards to the selection here -- while Apple's mostly done a good job including heavy hitters, we'd love to see services like Google+ and Viddler included in future releases. Some apps, like DropBox, might be a tall order, given their overlap with Apple's own offerings, such as iCloud.

If sharing were anything less than idiot-proof, it would be hard to imagine it becoming an essential part of people's workflows. After all, pasting a link to Twitter or uploading a photo to Flickr are already straightforward options -- as is AirDrop's close-proximity peer-to-peer sharing, which was introduced in Lion. That said, Apple made the whole ordeal as simple as possible. Click the Share button in your chosen program (or from Finder, with your chosen file highlighted), select your sharing method from the drop-down menu and send it off. Obviously, with Twitter, Facebook and email, you'll want to add some context, too.

You can do all of that from a "Share Sheet," Apple's sharing interface, which offers up an image of the file you intend to send, paper clipped to its side. The first time you attempt to send something using email, Twitter, etc. you'll be prompted to add an account, at which point the Mail pane will open in System Preferences. Once signed in, you're good to go across all of the apps that use this functionality. In the case of Twitter, Mail and Facebook, messages will be delivered directly to the Notification Center once you're logged in.

Sharing is just one of many features in Mountain Lion ported over from iOS -- take a look, even, at that little arrow icon, first used in the mobile versions of Mail and Safari. In the context of the iPhone and iPad, this feature is a necessity. On the desktop, not so much -- not with true multitasking and all that screen real estate anyway. Still, as unnecessary as it may seem, it's a nice addition to the OS. And, unlike other features introduced in this release, we can honestly see ourselves incorporating this into day-to-day workflow.

[Table of contents]

Notification Center

The most significant addition to Finder in Mountain Lion is actually hidden away -- or rather, pushed to the side. Your first hint that the Notification Center is even there is a rather plain graphic added to the upper-right corner of your desktop's toolbar: three parallel lines, the one in the center slightly shorter than those flanking it, with three square bullet points to their left. Clicking this will shift the whole desktop (save for the toolbar) to the left, revealing a hatched gray pane, the Notification Center. Just how far the whole thing shifts depends on the resolution of your monitor -- using the new 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display at a medium resolution, the display moved by about a fifth of the screen.

Notification Center can also be accessed with a two-fingered swipe, right-to-left, starting from off the trackpad. If you were worried that Apple was having trouble figuring out how to utilize screen real estate opposite the Dashboard, worry not. Shifting everything back is a simple matter of swiping the other way or clicking the icon or the desktop itself.

If you're wondering just how liberally Apple borrowed from iOS in Mountain Lion, take a little trip just off to the side of the desktop. Notification Center mimics iOS' drop-down notifications, right down to the color scheme. All important messages (and plenty of non-important ones) flow through here: email, Twitter, Facebook (coming soon), Messages, Calendar appointments, reminders and updates from OS X, the App Store, Safari, Facebook and Game Center. Click on a note and it will open up the full message / alert in its respective program.

Not keen on checking the Center every few minutes? Fear not: before populating the sidebar, the notes appear as a small banner in the upper right corner of your desktop (sorry, Growl), where they linger for a few seconds and then disappear, vanishing into the ether. You can speed up the process by swiping them offscreen using the trackpad. More important notes -- system updates, reminders and calendar appointments, for example -- show up as alerts, which need to be dismissed before they go away. No, you can't blame missed meetings on ol' Mountain Lion.

Of course, the whole banner / alert thing can be adjusted through the settings menu at the bottom of the Notification Center -- you can also opt to receive no notes at all, as well as disable sounds. If you're not feeling the default arrangement, you can't actually switch things around in Notification Center, but you can fine-tune things all you want in the settings. Apple has also found yet another location for sharing in the form of Notification Center, adding "Click to Post" and "Click to Tweet" buttons for Facebook and Twitter. (Again, Facebook support is currently in beta, coming later this year.)

With the addition of banner alerts, Notifications go right to the forefront of the OS X experience -- unless you go into settings and disable them (or just never sign into any accounts), it's awfully hard to avoid them. Not that we'd want to. Notifications are a truly handy addition that should fit quit comfortably into most people's workflows. They never felt particularly intrusive to us (especially since they disappear after a few seconds), but again, on days when you can't handle Twitter screaming for your attention, tuning out is as simple as rejiggering the settings.

[Table of contents]

Messages

Messages, wherever: Mountain Lion, left; iPad, right; iPhone, below.

Mourn not the loss of iChat -- Apple's long-running chat client had a good run, but things change, software evolves and mobile apps get absorbed en masse by desktop operating systems. It's the circle of life, really. iChat is being put out to pasture a month ahead of its 10th birthday, making room for another friendly face: Messages. The iOS client has been fully grafted onto OS X, and compared with other mobile-inspired features in Mountain Lion, Messages is arguably the most comfortable fit. After all, Messages is simply unavoidable in iOS. Integration here means you're able to communicate directly with anyone who has an iOS device. Thankfully, however, it's not just a closed Apple system; services that had been supported by iChat -- AIM, Google Talk, Jabber and Yahoo -- are included here, too.

Save for the touchscreen keyboard, the app looks pretty much the same as it does on the iPad. The left side is where you'll find different conversations, with a search bar at the top. The main pane, meanwhile, shows dialogues with the usual word bubbles -- by default, you're on the right side in light blue, and your friend is on the left in white, but you can tweak colors (as well as fonts) in the settings. As ever, you'll see an ellipsis when your friend is typing. Additionally, you can send messages to a phone number or email address (with a autocompletion if it's in your address book and connected to an Apple ID).

If you happen to have Messages closed while someone's attempting to get your attention, a notification will pop up in the corner of your desktop. If you're online, a new conversation will pop up in the left column, with a blue circle showing it's unread. You can add attachments like photos and video (up to 100MB), both of which will show up inline. Video, however, will open up in a separate player when you click on it. Speaking of video, you can click the FaceTime button in the upper-right corner to cut straight to staring at your friend's beautiful mug. Group messages are also possible by typing multiple names into the "To" field. The desktop version of Messages supports full-screen mode, message forwarding and lets you set delivery and read receipts, so you know your messages are getting through.

[Table of contents]

Mail and Contacts

Not a ton of changes on the Mail front, though Apple's made a few tweaks to its email client. Chief among these is the addition of VIPs -- a priority inbox of sorts that lets you hand-pick the folks who should skip to the front of your ever-flooded inbox. Hover over the email address of a sender and you'll see a little hollow star. Click this and, boom, that person gets the velvet rope treatment. You can view them and all their fellow Cristal-drinking emailers by clicking the VIPs tab in the mail toolbar. The rest of the riffraff will have to wait. It's worth mentioning too that Mail's got an itchy spam-filtering trigger finger. You'll want to do some inbox training when you first get started.

Speaking of preferences, all of your favorites, recent senders, signatures, smart mailboxes and other account info gets pushed out to iCloud and, by extension, all of your connected devices. Search in the Mail app has been souped up a touch, too -- start typing and it starts filtering, weeding out results that don't match. And skipping to the top of your inbox is as simple as clicking the sort bar at the top, in the blank space to the left of the actual "Sort By" drop down. Oh, and if you're looking to email a webpage, you can do so by clicking the Share button in Safari and selecting Mail from the drop down. A blank message will pop up, letting you chose how you want to deliver that content -- in Reader View or as a webpage, a PDF or link.

Address Book is now known as Contacts (*cough* iOS). Name change aside, things haven't really changed. A share button has been added, so you can send contact cards via email, Message and AirDrop. There are categories now, too -- you can add those by selecting New Group from File, dragging and dropping selected contacts into the categories. Handily, the Contacts app combines info from multiple sources -- email address, phone numbers, etc. -- into single entries, so you don't end up with multiple cards for any given person.

[Table of contents]

Calendar and Reminders

Similar to Contacts, iCal has been renamed Calendar to match its iOS counterpart. On the whole, though, the program looks nearly identical to its predecessor, down to the faux leather gracing the top pane, and the remnants of torn-out pages. There are a few minor tweaks here and there -- for one thing, the menu for toggling between multiple calendars (e.g., Work, Home, Gmail, etc.) has changed from a drop-down dialog box to a sidebar on the left.

Calendar's search, meanwhile, offers up events on the right side, rather than the bottom, where it sat in Lion. That search features offers up suggestions and search "tokens," which can be combined to create more specific searches. The date selector inside of an event now offers a small pop-up calendar, making it easier to choose a date by allowing you to go back and forth between months. And, of course, once events are added to the calendar, they'll feed into the Notification Center, sitting at the top of the screen until you see fit to dismiss them.

Reminders, compared: On Mountain Lion, left; On the new iPad (cropped to fit), right

As in iOS, Reminders live outside of the Calendar. The app, new to OS X, looks a lot like its iPad counterpart, except with a few aesthetic tweaks, including a more leathery theme and more detailed texturing in the app's binder paper. Rather than relying on the List / Date buttons on the left sidebar, the desktop version has a calendar in the bottom left (though you can make it disappear by hitting the calendar button at the bottom). Using the calendar, you can refine the reminders by day (though not by month or week), so you can see everything you need to do on, say, July 25th. Reminders are organized by categories in the sidebar. You can toggle between them by highlighting your chosen category or doing a two-fingered swipe left and right on the reminders themselves. Clicking the triangle icon in the bottom left-hand column will collapse the app into one column, removing categories from the view.

Click Reminders in that left sidebar and select a line on the paper to start writing. You can program due dates so Reminders can nag you as the deadline looms. Next to each reminder is a check box -- tick this when finished, and it'll get filed as complete. You can always untick it, if you need to add it back to your reminder list. As you'd expect, clicking the "i" that appears when you hover over the entry lets you go in and adjust its settings. You can add notes, change its priority, from None (no exclamation marks) to High (three explanation marks) in a drop-down menu and add reminders by ticking one of two boxes. Reminders can be set for a given date and time location -- be it arriving or leaving. To utilize the latter, you're going to have to enable location-based tracking in the Privacy pane of System Preferences. We set the reminder to pop up when we left Engadget HQ and took a quick stroll outside the building, and lo and behold, one New York City block later:

This popped up on the old iPhone 4. Pretty handy. The reminders get pushed to your devices via iCloud, appearing on the device you're using when the time comes to remind you. Really, that's what this app is all about -- it's less a desktop application than a counterpart to a feature that many are already using on their mobile devices. Notifications are key here. We've had some difficulty incorporating these sorts of applications into our daily lives -- particularly on the desktop. The ubiquity of the notifications, however, may be enough to give it one more go.

[Table of contents]

Safari

Naturally, Apple would love few things more than to wean you, the OS X user, off of your Chrome / Firefox dependency. As such, it's added a sprinkling of welcome features to help sweeten the pot. Chief among these is the new Smart Search field, which, to be honest, is more of an "it's about time" addition than a truly innovative feature. In short, it incorporates predictive search into the address bar. If you've used Chrome, you know the drill: start typing and Safari will start listening, pulling up suggestions based on your search history. As with Chrome, results from your Bookmarks and history are listed below the suggestions; Apple does a good job separating these results from one another, with a horizontal line.

The space just to the left of the toolbar has gotten a bit more crowded, too, with the addition of an iCloud logo (only once you've enabled that functionality in System Preferences) and, of course, that ubiquitous new Share button, which is home to Add Bookmark and Add to the Reading List, on top of the standard email / message / Twitter functionality. The iCloud feature, meanwhile, offers up compelling functionality for iOS users through iCloud Tabs, letting you pick up where you left of on your mobile device. It is, of course, not unlike Google's Chrome Sync feature, creating synergy between the companies' desktop and mobile operating systems. But while Chrome's recent appearance on iOS will likely lessen many users' dependence on Safari, as long at Apple's browser continues to be the default option on the iPhone and iPad, it's likely to continue to be the most popular web browser on those devices.

Speaking of tabs, the new Tab View feature does a good job incorporating the glass trackpad into the proceedings. Pinch with two fingers and the tabs will shrink down, arranged flat on a gray background, just under their respective page titles and URLs. From here, you can quickly scroll through the pages. It's a nice feature, to be sure, but it's not likely to become an essential part of the workflow for too many people outside of Safari power users.

Source: Engadget