Just over a year 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 features that will be familiar to iOS users
but are they enough to make it a must-have upgrade? Hell yes, says JASON SNELL.
The release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
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
when it launches – expected to be this month.
Its
low price and easy download have made Mountain Lion the most successful OS X
upgrade of all time
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 system wide 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.
At $20.99, 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 have already made Mountain Lion the most successful
OSX upgrade of all time downloads exceeded three million in the first four days
of availability.
(A compatibility note: Some Macs now
running Lion won’t be able to run Mountain Lion – see www.macworld.com.au/65256.)
iCloud comes to the fore
In 2011, in his last public event as Apple
CEO, Steve Jobs introduced iCloud – Apple’s internet-based system of data
storage and synchronization. At the time it was clearly a major strategic move
for the company and users of iOS 5 have benefited from several nice features,
including cloud backup and preference syncing across devices.
On
the Mac, iCloud integration has been limited
On the Mac, iCloud integration has been
limited. OS X Lion was finished before iCloud arrived, which prevented Apple
from deeply integrating the two. But Mountain Lion and the forthcoming iOS 6
make much better use of iCloud and – most impressively for users of both Macs
and iOS devices – use iCloud to work together.
It starts at setup: In Setup Assistant, the
system asks for your iCloud ID and will sync a bunch of core preferences
essentially the information stored in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars pane
in the system Preferences app. With this single log-in to iCloud, all your
email accounts, contacts, calendars, notes, reminders and the like will be
available on the Mac you’re using.
In a set of app updates timed with the
release of Mountain Lion, Apple updated the Mac iWork iOS apps to support
Documents in the Cloud. And TextEdit and Preview, two apps included with
Mountain Lion, also support Documents in the Cloud. (Apps from other developers
are also free to support this feature, as long as they’re sold through the Mac
App Store.)
Here’s how it works: Instead of the
traditional Open dialogue box, there’s a new box with two options: iCloud and
On My Mac. On My Mac is the ‘traditional’ Mac file picker, pretty much the same
concept as the one introduced back in 1984. But the iCloud option reveals a
view of all that app’s documents that are stored in iCloud.
When I first opened Pages on my Mountain
Lion-powered Mac, I was greeted with a collection of documents I didn’t expect
to see – they were all items I had created over the past year on my iPad using
Pages. I was able to open them and edit them, and the edits showed up almost
immediately on my iPad, too. When the process works, it’s nothing short of
magical.
Similarly, when you create a document in
one of these apps and try to save it, by default the Save dialogue box is set
to iCloud. You can switch over to your Mac’s hard drive if you want, but I’d
wager that average users will just save their file to iCloud and not worry
about navigating their bard drive’s file hierarchy.
But Documents in the Cloud id not all
silver lining. Some file types – text files, for example – can be opened by all
sorts of different apps, yet Documents in the Cloud doesn’t share files between
apps. For example, there’s no way to insert an image into a Pages or Keynote
document via iCloud short of opening Preview, grabbing the file from its iCloud
window and dragging into a page or slide. That seems less than ideal.
And while iCloud is free, that’s only for
the first 5GB of data. My iPhone and iPad backups already nudge me close to the
limit; adding a bunch of giant Keynote presentations will probably push me over
the edge. If Apple wants people to embrace Documents in the iCloud, it might
want to give users a bit more iCloud space without charging them for the
privilege.
iOS apps come to the Mac
With Mountain Lion, Apple is continuing the
approach begun in Lion to sync the look, feel and even nomenclature used by OS
X and iOS. The Address Book app is now Contacts, as on iOS. iCal is now
Calendar. More notable, there are a handful of new apps that have been built
specifically to match up with iOS counterparts – and to sync data across
devices.
Reminders.
This app, which looks more or less identical to the iOS version introduced with
iOS 5, syncs your reminders via iCloud. It supports the same basic to-do list
functionality as its iOS counterpart and you can set location-based reminders
that will, for example, trigger alerts on your iPhone when you enter or leave a
particular place.
The
Reminders app looks and works very much like its iOS counterpart
It’s hardly going to give complicated task-management
apps a run for their money, but that’s not always Apple’s goal when it builds
an app into its operating systems. This is an app for people who want a basic
set of checklists synced across all their devices.
Notes: With
its yellow college-ruled interface, the Notes app will be instantly familiar to
iPhone and iPad users. It’s also a suitable replacement for Stickies, the
venerable utility for jotting down a few notes to yourself.
But Notes on the Mac has a few extra tricks
up its sleeve: It supports rich text with different fonts, hyperlinks, bulleted
lists, images and even file attachments. The Notes apps on iOS and Mac sync
together, of course, so instead of having various separate notepads on all your
devices, all your notes are with you at all times. It really works and it’s
been useful enough to prompt me to start using Notes on my iPhone.
Notes doesn’t use the iCloud syncing,
though, which is kind of an odd choice. A legacy of the previous way you saw
Notes in Mac OS as a special mailbox in the Mail app means that Notes still
uses the IMAP email standard to sync, which also means you have to have a valid
IMAP email account entered in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars system preference
pane in order to use the syncing feature. It’s something Apple should probably
just migrate to iCloud for simplicity’s sake.
Game Center.
This app finally brings Apple’s buddy system for games across from iOS. Yes,
you can log in, add buddies and see what games your friends are playing from
the app. But the app isn’t as important as the fact that Game Center is now
available to Mac game developers.
