Other improvements
In addition to Gatekeeper, Mountain Lion
employs various other technologies to help keep your Mac secure.
Most significantly, Mountain Lion expands
on Lion’s requirement that apps be “sand-boxed”. Sandboxing prevents apps from
performing malicious activities on your Mac, and limits the damage
security-compromised apps can wreak on your machine. All new Mac App store apps
are sandboxed; so are several Apple apps in Mountain Lion, including FaceTime,
Mail, Reminders, Notes, and Safari.
Mountain Lion also uses Kernel Address
Space Layout Randomization (ASRL) to make it harder for malicious attackers to
exploit low-level system functions on your Mac. If you use File Vault, you can
now take advantage of management updates to the fdsetup
command-line tool, which allows third-party software to control and configure
FileVault features. You also get finer control over which apps can access your
location data, contacts, and Twitter credentials.
Security
check: Depending on your security settings, OS X may produce a pop-up asking
you to confirm that you really want to launch an app.
Finally, Mountain Lion checks for software
updates daily. In previous versions of OS X, you could manually configure how
often the system would check for updates; the default was once per week. But in
Mountain Lion, software updates move to the Mac App Store, which can check for
updates even when it’s not running. You’ll receive a Notification Center alert
whenever new OS X updates are available. So when or if new Mac-focused malware
starts to spread and Apple issues a fix, Mac users should at least become aware
of the fix’s availability more quickly than they might have before.
Airplay Mirroring
When iOS 4.2 debuted, Apple changed the
name of AirTunes – the feature that let you stream music from iTunes to an
AirPort Express to AirPlay, and in the process upgraded it considerably. In
addition to streaming audio from iTunes on your computer, you could stream from
any AirPlay-enabled iOS app – you could even stream video to any Apple TV. As
of iOS 5, you could actually mirror the screen of an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2 (or
later): Whatever was on that screen could appear on the display connected to
your Apple TV.
AirPlay mirroring was so great that people
wanted it for their Macs. And in Mountain Lion, Apple has delivered.
Mirror your Mac
You can now send your Mac’s screen to any
second- or third- generation Apple TV on the same local network to mirror it on
any connected TV. The only catch: Your hardware must be relatively new.
Specifically, it requires a mid-2011 or never iMac, Mac mini, or MacBook Air,
or an early 2011 or newer MacBook Pro.
Play
your Mac: Mountain Lion adds an AirPlay Mirroring menu, where you select the
Apple TVs you want to use.
If you do have a compatible Mac, Mountain
Lion automatically detects whether a compatible Apple TV is on your local
network. If so, an AirPlay Mirroring menu appears in the Displays pane of
System Preferences. (You can opt to have an AirPlay Mirroring menu appear in
the menu bar whenever an Apple TV is available). Choose your Apple TV, and in a
few seconds the Mac’s screen appears on your TV, with the Mac’s audio playing
through your TV or home-theater system. The video stream is encrypted, and it’s
optimized to give you the best image quality without stalling or producing
glitches.
High-res mirror
Mountain Lion gives you a few options for
choosing the best screen resolution, though your options depend on where you
set them. From the system wide menu, you can choose whether your Mac’s screen
appears at its standard resolution on your TV or changes to match the TV’s
native resolution – the latter option offers the sharpest image on your TV. In
the Displays pane of System Preferences, you can choose your screen’s native
resolution (Best For Display), the best resolution for streaming to your TV
(Best For AirPlay), or any of the other resolutions that your Mac supports
(Scaled). The Displays pane also lets you enable over scan correction.
(Note: Apple’s Mountain Lion features page
claims that AirPlay Mirroring supports up to 1080p HD, but Mountain Lion’s own
Help system indicates that mirroring sends a 720p video stream with stereo
audio).
Airplay
on: You implement and configure AirPlay Mirroring in the Displays preference
pane – but only on compatible Macs.
You’ll find a few nice touches here. For
example, if you play a video in iTunes while mirroring your Mac’s screen, the
AirPlay Mirroring feature automatically switches the video to full-screen mode
on your TV. And if you just want to listen to your Mac’s audio, you can use the
Sound pane of System Preferences (or Option-click the system wide volume menu)
to choose any Apply TV or AirPlay – enabled audio device; you’re no longer
limited to iTunes audio for audio streaming.
In addition to being useful for watching
movies, playing games, and surfing the Web on your big-screen TV at home the
new AirPlay mirroring feature is a welcome addition for presenters and
teachers. With an Apple TV and either an HDMI-compatible projector or an HDMI to
VGA adapter such as the Kanex ATV Pro ($60), you can project your presentations
and live demos from anywhere in the room wirelessly.
Auto Save
Auto save – the feature introduced with OS
X Lion that allowed you to browse back through previously saved versions of a
document – gains some nice new capabilities in Mountain Lion.
In the Lion version of Auto Save, you could
click the title of a document and choose to lock, duplicate, revert to the last
saved version, or browse all versions of the file. Mountain Lion adds new
options: Now you have commands for renaming and moving file, as well as for
retrieving the last saved version of the file.
Which of those commands you see depends on
whether you’ve saved the file and where you saved it. For example, if you
create a TextEdit document and type something in it, the file’s title bar will
read Untitled – Edited. The Edited label means that Auto Save has saved your
file to iCloud. It’s a useful feature should TextEdit inexplicably quite before
you’ve saved your latest changes.
Updated
menu: Apple has updated the Auto Save menu in Mountain Lion to include new
options, such as Rename and Move To.
When you purposefully save the file, you
have the option to save it on iCloud (provided you have an iCloud account and
have granted your Mac access to it) or to your Mac. (Interesting tidbit:
TextEdit will claim that it has saved your document to iCloud even if you don’t
have an active Internet connection. Obviously the file is stored locally, as it
can’t go online. However, once you do establish an Internet connection, the
file gets moved automatically to iCloud).
As of this writing, the option to save to
iCloud is available in TextEdit, Preview, and an updated version of iWork.
The title bar’s drop-down menu makes
it easy to move files between iCloud and your Mac.
