Does it matter that Mountain Lion
offers evolution, not revolution?
While Microsoft eagerly combines two
somewhat disparate operating systems the modern, sleek Metro and the less
modern but robust and popular Windows with all the gusto of a kid
hammering together two pieces of Lego that don't quite fit, Apple's seemingly
just repainted a bit. At least that's what you'd believe if you follow many
pundits, who've gleefully claimed, once again, that Apple's heading for Doom
City, having simply rolled out Mountain Lion, a 'feature release'. Those two
words should, judging by the articles they are attached to, be read with
disdain, in the same manner you'd say the words 'dog' and 'mess' when
explaining in a grumpy fashion to a colleague that you'd recently trodden in
something.
MacBook Air
I don't really get the grumbling: Mountain
Lion costs all of 14 quid and shock! It doesn't revolutionize the Mac. Well,
that's just fine by me, because I didn't really fancy upgrading and having to
learn everything from scratch. (Being a Mac hack, I don't really have much
choice but to upgrade editors would probably eye me suspiciously if I filed
screen grabs from, say, a mono Mac Plus running System 7.) What's really
important is whether the features provided are any good or not, much like when
you're upgrading any other software.
As ever, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Safari
6, for example, which also happens to be available for Lion, finally has a
unified address bar but now also boasts an obnoxious 'Reader' button that
practically screams 'SAVE ME TO READ LATER!' every time you end up on a page
that it considers anything but an index. And I'm sure that most power users are
going to get sick of Gatekeeper blocking installs from anything other than Mac
App Store apps and 'identified developers'. (Mercifully, you can turn this
feature off, if you wish.)
Go further afield, though, and there's a
lot to like. There are subtle changes, such as the return of the mini calendars
to Calendar (formerly iCal); the app still looks stupid, fake leather garb and
all, but at least it's now more usable. Notes and Reminders now have their own
apps, like on iOS, and data seamlessly syncs across devices and Macs via
iCIoud. Notification Center provides a system alternative to Growl. Dictation
makes the leap across from the iPad, and potentially means not having to splash
out huge wodge of cash on a paid app for getting ideas down quickly. And then
there's AirPlay mirroring, meaning you can now fire across whatever's on your
Mac's screen to your HDTV via the inexpensive Apple TV hockey puck (as easily
as you can from an iPad or iPhone). That might not sound like something you'd
regularly want to do at home (especially if you own an iOS device), but the
possibilities for education and enterprise are interesting when you consider
the cost of an HDTV and Apple TV versus a projector (and all the 'hilarious'
things that can inevitably go wrong when trying to get a laptop to talk to a
projector). Oh, and Save As is back, albeit 'hidden' under
Command-Shift-Option-S, but that should nonetheless shut up curmudgeonly old
Mac users moaning about the new duplicate/auto save model.
Mountain Lion: really quite similar to Lion, but that's no bad thing
There's no 'Spotlight'-level new feature
this time, nor did something that makes you go ‘wow’ like Quick Look or Expose.
But smaller changes that will potentially make me more productive, and that
have a tiny learning curve, for the princely sum of 14 quid, seems like a good
deal to me. Rather than something is complain about.
