OS X Mountain Lion Operating System Review

Mountain Lion logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Source: macworld.com

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One year and one week since the release of OS X Lion, Apple is back with Mountain Lion, also known as OS X 10.8.

Like Lion, Mountain Lion offers numerous feature additions that will be familiar to iOS users. This OS X release continues Apple’s philosophy of bringing iOS features “back to the Mac,” and includes iMessage, Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Twitter integration, Game Center, and AirPlay Mirroring. There are even a few features that are making their debut with Mountain Lion, and will find their way back into iOS 6 this fall.

As the first OS X release post-iCloud, Mountain Lion offers a much more thorough integration with Apple’s data-syncing service than Lion offered. Mountain Lion also brings options to limit which kinds of apps users can install, offers systemwide integration with social networking and media-sharing services, and gives some recent MacBook models the power to keep working even when they appear to be asleep. And although there are no actual mountain lions in China, OS X Mountain Lion does add a raft of features to speak to users in the country that’s Apple’s biggest growth opportunity.

At $20, Mountain Lion is Apple’s cheapest OS X upgrade since version 10.1 was free 11 years ago; like Lion, Mountain Lion is available only via a Mac App Store download. The combination of the low price and the easy download will likely make Mountain Lion the most quickly adopted OS X upgrade of all time. Given how solid a release I found Mountain Lion to be, that’s a good thing.

(A compatibility note: Some Macs now running Lion won’t be able to run Mountain Lion. For more details, read our Mountain Lion FAQ.)

Related articles

• How to create an OS X Mountain Lion USB installation drive
• Mountain Lion: New King of the OS X Jungle
• That was fast: OS X Mountain Lion running on 1 of every 10 Macs
• Chitika: OS X Mountain Lion continues to gain share

iCloud could potentially do wonders for sync

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Source: macworld.com

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Cross-Device Productivity

By now we have heard all sorts of things about iCloud.

But the thing I am most interested in is how it will help me access documents that I am working with or need access to across my devices from my laptop to iPad to iPhone and my iMac at home.

I'm much more interested in how the service could theoretically improve my cross-device productivity.

Right now, iPad file management requires a combination of several kludgey methods.

Search the Web - including this very site - and you'll find plenty about the awesomeness of Dropbox, but not every iOS app supports it (including any of Apple's). The apps that do support Dropbox each rely upon their own implementation.

All this is true of Apple's own iDisk, too, except that we haven't spent much ink extolling that service's virtues.

(I don't use iDisk anymore. I found it slow and occasionally hungry for eating up my files.)

But if iCloud means we can stop relying on sending files between apps, we'll be thrilled.

Thus, my wish for iCloud is that it includes Dropbox-esque live document sharing and synchronization between Macs and iOS devices.

I want it to be built in such a way that developers can include it in their apps as easily as they can embed an Open dialog box (on the Mac) or call up the virtual keyboard (on iOS).

All the work - the syncing, the interface itself - should fall under Apple's purview, so that the experience is constant and equally available to all developers.

As I imagine it, I could create a document in Pages on my Mac and save it to iCloud.

When I go to my iPad, I can open the same document there from iCloud within the mobile Pages app.

And as with Google Docs, if I leave the document open on multiple devices at the same time, each of them automatically updates on-the-fly to remain current with whichever version I'm actually editing at that moment.

If iCloud merely simplifies that process with Dropbox-style syncing that's baked into the core of both Lion and iOS 5, I'll be on cloud nine.

But if Apple wants to send my joyousness levels into the stratosphere - and really, why wouldn't the company share that goal? - the process of saving files to and from iCloud will be seamless and nearly invisible.

Though I love Google Calendar, I prefer iCal overall, and iCal's Google Calendar support is weak.

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