By Brian Heater
For all of Apple's unabashed love of all things cloud-based, one new Safari feature does actually manage to acknowledge the fact that we can't always live our lives online. Reading List, that icon with the little spectacles that sits along the bottom of the Safari toolbar, now does offline browsing, a feature that actually manages to distinguish itself from bookmarks, something Apple didn't properly manage in Lion. Save something to Reading List (either through the Bookmarks drop-down menu or the Share This icon next to the toolbar) and you'll have to wait just a bit while system caches textual and graphic elements. And sure enough, if you fire up Safari offline, you'll be able to read full pages, images and all -- a handy little feature for reading news stories on the go, should you plan on taking your computer on the subway or on a plane that doesn't offer WiFi.
But what about the seemingly endless strings of passwords we're forced to remember? Has Safari done anything to make them easier to manage? We're glad you asked. When you first fire up the browser, Safari will ask, many times over, if you'd like it to remember this password or that. You can either agree, put it off for later or just do away with the question altogether. It's a bit of a nuisance when you're first getting started, but if you've got a machine no one else will be using, it's a useful feature, particularly for those who have more individual passwords than the human brain could be expected to retain.
Even handier (and more secure, too) is the new Password pane, which lives inside of the Preferences menu in Safari. Click through and you'll see a list of websites along with usernames and encrypted passwords. If you ever need help remembering one, click Show Passwords to bring up a dialog box, where you'll enter your system password. Once you've done that, you'll see your passwords listed, clear as day. You can also remove saved passwords from the pane, should you ever start to feel paranoid. Do Not Track, a privacy standard supported by browser bigwigs Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera, meanwhile, complements the privacy options offered by Private Browsing, helping to limit the amount of private information you let slip while browsing.
Performance has been enhanced, according to Apple, with hardware acceleration and Javascript bumps -- and Safari is really quite smooth, particularly if you're using the trackpad to scroll. One minor, but handy improvement is the ability to rename bookmarks directly from the toolbar. Hold down a click on one, and Safari will highlight it, letting you make the change right there.
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iCloud
With iCloud at the epicenter of Apple's cross-device push, it's hardly a surprise that it's the cornerstone of this latest OS upgrade. Cloud-based storage is, after all, the glue binding much of the OS X and iOS experiences together, syncing your contacts, notes, reminders, calendar appointments and Safari bookmarks. As such, the company has gone out of its way to simplify the process. Sign in with your iCloud account and Apple gives you a chance to opt out of syncing all the above-mentioned services, as well as set up Find My Mac, for locating and remotely wiping a lost PC.
Once signed in, iCloud lets you pick and choose which services you want to sync: Mail, Contacts, Calendar / Reminders, Notes, Safari, Photo Stream, Documents, Back to My Mac and Find my Mac. After you opt in, Apple will begin the great syncing, pulling data from your iOS devices onto your computer and vice versa. If you uncheck one of the elements, it will remove the synced data from your computer (though not before warning you). The primary iCloud page also offers up a status bar on the bottom, letting you know just how much of that iCloud storage you're currently using.
A feature that was unavailable back when Mountain Lion first arrived in beta, the Documents Library marks a big step forward for iCloud. Just save something in a cross-device app like Pages, and it offers up a drop-down menu of locations, starting with iCloud, which makes that file accessible on devices signed into that account. Accessing the Library is as simple as clicking Open in an app with that functionality. From here, you can open the doc to read or edit, duplicate it, rename it or transfer it via email, AirDrop or Message, courtesy of the Share button. Docs can be viewed as icons or lists, and can be sorted by name, date and size. You can also create folders by dragging one doc onto the other, iOS-style. Documents can also be dragged and dropped from the Library onto your desktop and vice versa.
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Auto Save, TextEdit and Notes
Pinch-to-zoom, another "sure, why not" feature, has been brought over to TextEdit, letting you adjust text size using the trackpad. It'll save your cursor a trip to the toolbar, but mostly it feels like another step in Apple's eventual plan to incorporate that functionality into all of its native apps. And, again, why not? The MacBook's got a great trackpad -- might as well get as much use out of it as possible. Still, the implementation isn't perfectly smooth here -- once pinched, the text takes a moment to snap into place.
The Auto Save functionality introduced the last go 'round has been peppered with some additional features. Clicking the name of an open file in TextEdit brings up a number of features, including Rename, Duplicate, Move To, Lock and Revert. Choosing Rename highlights the title, offering up a quick and easy way to affix a new name to the file. Command-Shift-S and Command-Shift-Option-S have been added to the keyboard shortcut arsenal for easy access to Duplicate and Save As, respectively. The "Move To" option, meanwhile, offers Apple yet another opportunity to integrate iCloud, letting you transfer anything saved to your desktop to that ethereal land of infinite document sharing.
Actually, by saving to your desktop, you've already skipped out on an iCloud opportunity. Apple has front-loaded the feature, making it the default location for saved documents. Of course, you can also save to your desktop, if you're still living in a localized, pre-cloud universe. Saving to iCloud lets you share your documents across other OS X devices. If you want to edit a doc created in TextEdit on an iOS device, however, you're out of luck -- it only works on Mac-to-Mac transfers for the time being. If you save a file in Pages, however, you'll get that cross-platform functionality.
iCloud plays a key role in Notes, another feature borrowed wholesale from iOS. Apple describes its functionality thusly: "Jot down things you need to remember and easily find them later." Easy enough -- and really, it's mostly as simple as it sounds. After all, it was a program designed for making quick notations on the go, on a small screen. The program does, however, offer up more functionality than its Post-it-esque predecessor, Stickies (which, for the record, managed to avoid the 10.8 chopping block). The interface looks like a pad of well-loved legal paper, with a few sheets already ripped out. Typed text shows up on the notebook lines in customizable and optional bullet points and numbered lists. Images and attachments can be added as well, simply by dragging and dropping them directly onto the app, for a more accurate representation than you're likely to be able to sketch out on your real-life notepad. Handier still are links, which, when highlighted, can also be dragged and dropped right onto the paper.
Along the top, you get the date and time and an option for expanding the little app to full-screen, if you're the sort who loves to cram a lot of information onto a single page. Along the bottom are a trashcan for dumping notes you no longer need (what, no crumpling paper animation?) and an option for sharing the text via email or Messages. To the left of the sheet is a list of the notes you've made and above that is a search bar for finding something amongst the pad. Double-click a note in the list, and it'll get "pinned" to the desktop, staying open after you close the app. At the bottom is a big Plus for making new notes. Click the button just to the right of that and you'll get a broader list of notes across devices. Yep, Notes is connected to iCloud too, getting pushed to connected devices in a matter of moments. Click the Plus icon next to the list items, and you can organize your notes into sub-folders.
The addition of Notes in Mountain Lion makes the app all the more necessary for those using both OS X and iOS. It's a truly handy tool for keeping track of those little bits of information that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. The changes to Autosave are welcome, as well -- anything that makes it harder for us to accidentally lose our hard work is alright by us. TextEdit has certainly received some nice boosts, particularly its broader integration with iCloud. Apple's clearly looking to take on Google Docs here, though we'd be hesitant to make the jump, given that Docs is more accessible on more platforms. If, however, you're an iOS / OS X devotee who already uses Pages, this integration will certainly make your life a heck of a lot easier.
Dictation
Those holding their breath for the arrival of Siri on the desktop will likely be pretty blue in the face until this time next year -- the cheeky personal assistant isn't on the list of Mountain Lion's 200-plus features. Apple has, however, seen fit to bring Dictation over to OS X in a major way, incorporating it into any app that involves typing. This means Pages, TextEdit, Notes, Mail -- heck, you can even type in Gmail, so long as it's open in Safari. You can also put it to work in third-party applications -- we were able to dictate Gmail messages in Chrome, for instance, though we couldn't quite get it to work in Google Docs, regardless of whether we had it open in Safari or Chrome. Hit the Function key twice (you can also change this command in the settings), and a small microphone glowing purple will appear in a word bubble off to the side of the app. Speak slowly and clearly, hit Done when you're finished, and it'll get to work. We gave the feature a test drive and were pretty impressed with what we saw:
This is me trying out dictation. It seems be working out pretty well so far. I'm not sure if I could type an entire paper using this however. But perhaps for short things this is a good idea. I don't know, people in my office [are] probably going to stare at me funny if I keep using this to type all of my things.
One or two fumbles. Still, not bad for a first go. And yeah, this writer has been told that he has a tendency to mumble. For periods, simply say "period." It's the same with commas and question marks and commands like "all caps" and "new paragraph." It's all quite straightforward and easy to use the first time you give it a shot. It currently supports US, UK and Australian English, Japanese, German and French. But again, it can't do much about your coworkers staring at you while you talk to your computer.
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Mac App Store and Game Center
The Mac App Store gets some upgrades here, too: app update notes show up in the Notification Center, you can use the trackpad to swipe between pages in your App Store history and a Share button lets you broadcast your app discoveries over Twitter, Messages and Facebook. And since ML is only available through the App Store, it makes sense that all OS X upgrades come through there as well, downloading automatically for your installing pleasure. App updates auto-download as well, and all new applications you download will get pushed to other computers tied to your account.
A tale of two Game Centers: Mountain Lion, left; the new iPad (cropped to fit), right.
Oh, how people would have laughed at you 10 years ago, had you told them that one day, Apple would become a kingpin in the gaming world. Yet in a relatively short amount of time, the company has managed to go from a virtual non-presence in gaming to the creator of one of the industry's most popular platforms. Of course, that popularity grew mostly independently of Apple's desktop operating system. Having managed to capture the imagination of slews of mobile gamers, the company is now looking to translate some of that success into the desktop experience, offering up an OS X version of Game Center, the social gaming experience first introduced for iOS 4.
The primary reasoning behind bringing the feature over to the desktop seems to be the opportunity to allow OS X users to compete against iPhone and iPad owners in multiplayer games in an already bustling ecosystem (with 130 million registered accounts, as announced at WWDC last month). Sign in with your existing account and you'll bring over your info from iOS. Through Game Center, you can find friends and opponents. Game Center also offers up in-game voice chat, parental controls and, of course, notifications, which alert you to friend requests and invitations, and tell you when it's your time to play a turn-based game.
Unfortunately, you're going to have to re-buy / re-download the OS X version of the games -- and at the time of this review, that selection is pretty sparse. We can certainly see the appeal of maintaining scores across devices and playing against pals with iOS, but at the moment, we can't see the desktop version of Game Center becoming vital gameplay -- at least not in the near future.
[Table of contents]Gatekeeper and Security
When Apple first tipped us off about Gatekeeper, we were admittedly skeptical. We're all for security, of course, especially in a world were OS X's growing popularity has made it an increasingly popular target for hackers, but as OS X begins to look more and more like iOS, it runs the risk of becoming a far more controlled, less flexible environment. Because, let's be honest: Apple craves fewer things more than complete control over its hardware and software, even if that means severely limiting the influence of third parties. Gatekeeper seeks to reduce the presence of malicious applications on your system. By default, your system is set up to only accept downloads directly from the App Store or identified developers -- a fact that leads to dialog boxes such as this one:
This can all be adjusted by making your way into the Security and Privacy pane in System Preferences, where you can ratchet up the security (allow applications downloaded from Mac App Store) or pare it down (allow applications downloaded from anywhere). Apple would no doubt love to keep your downloads restricted to its tightly vetted App Store. But even extended to include non-App Store downloads by companies with a Developer ID, legit programs can still get flagged (see: Spotify). Of course, Apple's been working double-time to get developers signed up ahead of Mountain Lion's launch -- and, worst case scenario, you can always switch your system settings when you need to download an app not listed in Cupertino's database.
Though Gatekeeper is the primary new security addition to Mountain Lion, Apple's got a few more tricks up its sleeve to tackle the aforementioned ever-growing threat against OS X. For one thing, the OS promises to check for security updates every day. Also, Safari, Mail, Reminders, FaceTime, Game Center and Notes all join the list of sandboxed applications offered up by Apple. Kernel ASLR malware protection is on-board as well, along with new FileVault management tools. According to Apple the encryption being offered up is currently in the process of getting its FIPS 140-2 certification, to help it hit the government's standards. We're not yet seeing the kind of focus on security enhancements that Microsoft will talk up with each new release of Windows, but Apple does seem to be coming to grips with the fact that, yes, Macs can get malware.
[Table of contents]Dashboard and Launchpad
As ever, Dashboard is always just a three-finger swipe away. Not a ton has changed from a UI standpoint, but Apple's apparently looking to bring more folks over to the barebones interface by making widgets easier to discover. Swipe your way in and you'll see Plus and Minus buttons at the bottom of the screen. Clicking Minus brings pop-up Xs on top of your widgets, so you can get the ones you don't want out of your sight (so long, Ski Report). Hitting the Plus will bring a list of all the default widgets -- pretty much the same selection offered up in Lion, albeit in a slightly roomier configuration. Click a widget and it'll appear on your main Dashboard page. You can also hold down on a widget and then click to transfer it to the front of the Dashboard.
Along the top of the page is a search bar so widget hoarders can find an item amongst the clutter. As you type, widgets that don't match the description will begin disappearing. Need something that's not stored locally? Click More Widgets and you'll be magically whisked away to Apple.com's Dashboard page, where you can download around 3,900 widgets -- at last count. Oh yeah, and you can add widget folders to the list of borrowed iOS features. From the Dashboard browser, simply drag on widget icon onto another and the screen will split, revealing the contents of your newly created folder. Once created, you can keep dragging more icons into the folder (you can't drag a folder into a folder however -- let's not get greedy). To make a folder disappear, simply drag all of its contents out.
Launchpad, Lion's boldest step toward an iOS-like interface, is still present in Mountain Lion, accessible via the dock, a click of F4 (on newer-model MacBooks) or by pinching the trackpad with three fingers and thumb. The Mac app interface looks nearly identical to its predecessor: rows of mobile-inspired icons atop a blurred desktop backdrop. As with Dashboard, however, Apple's added a search bar to the top of the screen, with irrelevant apps disappearing as you type.
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Accessibility
Still Universal: Lion's Universal Access settings, left; Mountain Lion's Accessibility menu, right
Apple has also done a bit to make Universal Access more, well, universally accessible, beginning with the name, which has been truncated to Accessibility -- a name borrowed from iOS (naturally). The pane offers up various options to help users with disabilities customize their experience (it's possible for both sighted and visually impaired people to do this). Apple has also improved Accessibility through a new keyboard shortcut -- Command-Option-F5 -- which brings up a simplified version of the menu, anywhere in the operating system. From here you can enable the zooming of features (via keyboard shortcuts or scrolling), VoiceOver, adaptable keys and display configurations like color inversion and contrast adjustments.
More complex Accessibility features can be accessed by hitting Preferences in that window, or by locating them the old-fashioned way, through System Preferences in the dock. In Mountain Lion, the settings are a bit easier to navigate -- a vital consideration for this user group. The push buttons on the top of the pane have been traded in for a simpler, easier-to-navigate side panel with large icons, offering up options in the category of Seeing, Hearing and Interacting (which combines the Keyboard and Mouse & Trackpad offerings from Lion). Again, simplicity is the thing here. Graphical user interfaces can be quite difficult to navigate for the visually impaired and people with other disabilities -- there's no need to clutter them up unnecessarily.
The visual element of VoiceOver's spoken text.
Mountain Lion's also ushers in some revised features in Accessibility. VoiceOver, which translates onscreen elements into spoken text, gets the most love here, with drag-and-drop functionality coming via modifier keys and the ability press and hold buttons and reorder tables. The latest big cat release also sees the introduction of 14 new braille displays. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking on this front, but it's definitely nice to see Apple expand its support for disabled users.
[Table of contents]Power Nap
What's the old saying? If you can't nap longer, nap harder? Pretty sure it's something along those lines. That's the driving force behind Power Nap, an attempt to put your system to work, even while it's sleeping. The new feature, introduced in 10.8, works while your system is in sleep mode, whether plugged in or on running off of battery power, performing Time Machine backups and delivering updates that you can install the minute the machine wakes back up. Mail, Notes, Reminders and Messages all get delivered as well, without the addition of fans or system lights. And, it works whether your machine is napping with its lid up or down, all without spinning up any fans or using a lot of power -- however, it's only going to work if your system has flash-based storage. Pretty cool feature, all in all.
[Table of contents]Preview
Even poor, oft-neglected Preview gets a little bit of feature love this time out. The image / PDF viewer gets sprinkled with the normal assortment of Mountain Lion features, including Sharing (via Email, Message, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, Flick and iPhoto) and Documents in the Cloud, so you can check out those images and PDFs on the go -- pretty handy, that. The PDF functionality gets some bumps as well, detecting text fields for you to fill out and letting you add inline notes. You can also search notes and highlights and plug scanned images and pages into PDF, going a ways toward making you a little less reliant on yet another Adobe product. Oh, Apple, you scamp.
[Table of contents]Features for the Chinese market
Given Apple's growing presence in China, it should be no surprise that Mountain Lion comes with plenty of localized goodies designed to lure in more desktop users there. For instance, those who choose China as the system's region will see a few extra options in "Mail, Contacts & Calendars" under System Preferences (after logging out and back in again, that is). Three of those are popular Chinese mail services: 163 Mail, 126 Mail and QQ Mail. You also get Sina Weibo -- China's most well-known microblogging platform, which works very much the same way on Mountain Lion as Twitter. Finally, for video sharing, the list includes Youku and Tudou, though strangely enough, these are only via the Share button in QuickTime and not iMovie. We guess it's only a matter of time before Apple provides a more convenient way for Chinese users to share their videos.
Most other Mountain Lion features for China are related to text input. While we're not exactly experts in every single type of Chinese input method, Apple claims it has significantly expanded on the existing offerings, especially handwriting recognition and the pronunciation-based Pinyin (including the newly added Fuzzy Pinyin to cater to different regional accents). Most notably, in Pinyin mode you can now type in English within a Chinese sentence without having to switch keyboards like in the olden days -- your English words would simply show up as an option in the suggested word list.
Speaking of which, Mountain Lion will also quietly update its library to enhance its phrase suggestions over time, and the Chinese user dictionary gets the same iCloud sync treatment as its English counterpart. If you do get stuck with certain Chinese words, fret not, because OS X will now come with a simplified Chinese definition dictionary, so you can look up Chinese words by tapping on them with three fingers (tip: if your system's set up in English, you'll need to activate the Chinese dictionary in the Dictionary app). Alas, this is only a Chinese-to-Chinese dictionary, and it's just in simplified Chinese (Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan still use traditional Chinese), so some users will still have to rely on third-party solutions.
Other tidbits include the addition of Baidu as an optional default engine in Safari (to be honest, many advanced users would probably prefer sticking with Google for all sorts of sticky-icky reasons), as well as eight new Chinese fonts (though only four of them include traditional Chinese characters).
[Table of contents]System
Scrolling with Dinosaurs: The standard bar, left; the expanded version, right.
The most prevalent tweak on the system side has to be the beefed-up scroll bars. Anyone who's had trouble grabbing ahold of the disappearing / reappearing page movers will appreciate the ability to expand / change the color of the things by hovering over them. Those engaging in screen sharing, meanwhile, will like the ability to just drag and drop files between computers for transferring. The full-screen app mode, which was introduced back in 10.7, has been extended to secondary displays. This isn't a huge change, mind you -- in Lion, you could have an app go full-screen in an external monitor, so long as it was set as your primary display. Also, as with Lion, your other monitor will be blocked out when in full-screen on one of the displays, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole dual-monitor thing.
Screen saver gets a little love, too. There's a slew of new slideshow viewing options, including a panning one named after our documentarian pal Ken Burns, who already got a nod over in iMovie. Click one of those options and you can choose the source of your photostream from a drop-down menu, including default folders like National Geographic, Aerial and Cosmos or your own shots. The new Faces feature in iPhoto lets you tag people in pictures, making it easier to choose images when time comes to pick a profile pic or putting faces to the names in Contacts.
While we can't personally claim to be heavy Font Book users, the new Smart Collections feature is pretty neat, letting you group different styles together by refining search criteria. Speaking of collections, the Xsan 3 cluster file system is on-board for shared storage, as is X11 install, if you should happen to need it for a particular app.
[Table of contents]Performance
Apple hinted at some small performance enhancements, but the company isn't exactly broadcasting them as a selling point for 10.8. Overall, we found the performance to be quite brisk -- we ran our standard OS X benchmarks, Geekbench and Xbench, and saw slight performance boosts versus the numbers we got with the same Retina display MacBook Pro running Lion. It wasn't a huge gain by any stretch, but we'll never argue against with a performance boost, no matter how minor.
[Table of contents]Odds and ends
- Photo Booth's getting Sharing, naturally, with options including AirDrop, Messages, Mail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo. The Sharing menu also makes it possible to pick a new Twitter profile picture directly from Photo Booth.
- That old Apple workhorse videoplayer, QuickTime (now in version 10.2), gets a couple of minor upgrades, including "high performance" H.264 encoding. Naturally, too, you get built-in sharing here, letting you share the next Citizen Kane via email, Message, AirDrop, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr.
- Time Machine gets simple encryption this time out -- just click Encrypt Backups during the setup process. It's also possible to choose multiple locations from within Time Machine, so you can backup your computer to work and home drives.
- The Dictionary gets some trackpad functionality in this build, as well. Now you can use a two-fingered swipe to flip back and forth between searches, just like the olden days then they used to make books out of paper. Mountain Lion also now offers dictionaries in Simplified Chinese, Spanish and German -- weirdly, there's no share button here. We can't be the only ones who were looking forward to posting some hot definitions on Twitter.
Above: Flipping through pages in Dictionary. Hmmm...
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Wrap-up
Let's get this out of the way, shall we? Does Mountain Lion justify its $20 price tag? Yes. Of course it does. If you're an OS X user with a reasonably new piece of hardware, stop what you're doing and upgrade now. There are 200 features here -- odds are you're going to discover a couple you like. Better yet, if you picked up your system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on June 11th or later, you can get it for free. AirPlay Mirroring, Messages, Notifications and some great new uses for iCloud make for an extremely solid upgrade. In our time with the new operating system, we experienced no major issues; just rare hiccups that can are likely to be fixed in a system update. Heck, even the installation went smoothly. Apple devotees will find a lot to like amid the long list of tweaks and new features.
Does Mountain Lion justify its $20 price tag? Yes. Of course it does.
Taken as a whole, the features mark a fairly aggressive bid to fold the best of OS X and iOS into one product -- a strategy we first saw with the introduction of the Mac App Store on Snow Leopard, and with the arrival of Launchpad last year in Lion. Fears that the operating system has become more walled-off in the face of these moves are mostly overblown -- for now, at least. GateKeeper and the App Store hint at how Apple might seek to regulate the OS X experience to the degree it does on iOS, where content from outside the App Store's heavily vetted selection is strictly forbidden (though not expressly illegal, of course). Moving ahead, we hope the company continues to allow end users to download whatever they please.
As for that question of precisely how fresh OS X feels -- it's not quite fair to compare the change between Lion and Mountain Lion to the steps between Windows 7 and 8. After all, the company has mostly been keeping to a yearly upgrade schedule, and while OS X has maintained a fairly consistent aesthetic presentation since it was first released in the world back in 2001, every upgrade has brought with it key features, and the end result is a very different operating system than the one we were introduced to more than 10 years ago.
That said, it seems time for Apple to make a bold new pronouncement on the desktop front. The company appears to have most of its resources invested in the mobile side -- and there's no question as to why: the iPhone and iPad have reinvigorated the company, making it a computing player on a scale that no one (save, perhaps, for Jobs himself) could have predicted a decade ago. Still, it might be hard for OS X users not to feel neglected -- many of the latest new features feel a bit like iOS hand-me-downs. When and if Apple rolls out a new operating system this time next year, hopefully we'll be seeing a very different side of Mac OS.
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