After yesterday evening’s fireworks wound down, I installed Apple OS X Mountain Lion on Oswald Cobblepot, my middle-aged Mac Mini that does photo, movie, and music chores. Mountain Lion installs in two steps, purchase of the installer from the Mac App Store and running of the installer. The installation process takes a couple of hours but requires minimal attention once started. At least, that’s the case when upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion.
I was a little bit nervous. Although the skies were quiet when I kicked off the update, another wave of storms came through the area about mid-way through. The thunder gods were kind and left the power alone. Once installation is complete, the machine restarts using the new OS image and updated programs. The changes from Lion to Mountain Lion are subtle. Apple has revised the OS X applications to look a lot like their iPad counterparts in IOS 5. They’ve added messages, reminders, notes, and a notification system similar to that in IOS. A lot of the release is about integration with iCloud. Mountain Lion syncs notes and reminders in addition to calendar items, contacts, and mail.
At the moment, there appear to be no downsides. The applications that I use weekly work without fuss. These include iBank and Investoscope, both purchased outside the App Store. Gatekeeper is a new feature of Mountain Lion that is baked into the process launch services of the operating system. The process manager checks each application being started to verify that it was signed by the Apple App Store or a registered developer. Gatekeeper will let you run unsigned applications by presenting a dialog reporting that the image is unsigned and requesting authorization to run it.
Apple did not tinker with Air Play other than to make it possible to redisplay the Mac OS X desktop on an Air Play display server. iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple TV, and other Mountain Lion equipped Macs can be Air Play display servers. This is a nice touch for business. Buy an HD HDMI interface projector, connect it to an Apple TV, and presenters can show visuals without all the silliness that goes on at meetings. And you can play Hulu+ content on your telly, even things not permitted to play in iPad/iPhone.
Another thing Apple left alone is the annoying habit of the window manager of going into beach ball mode and refusing to let you work with another application when you make a slow to finish request. In 10 years of life with OS X, I’ve yet to see a pattern to when the window manager does this. Modal dialogs are evil, particularly those that kidnap the mouse until dismissed. Apple is slowly eliminating this sort of thing but there is still some of it left. OS X’s great strength is that it is multi-user and multi-tasking from the kernel up. No need to act like Windows 3.1.
A third party audio player went into a hard run playing a high resolution FLAC file while I was writing this article. That’s about it so far for troubles. And this may be the player’s fault, not the OS update.
Dismal Manor Dispatches 