So I have Mountain Lion running one Mac , and I have already learnt something the hard way. Once you download , BACK UP the installer somewhere , after installing ,the Mountain Lion installer disappears without a trace so if you own more than one mac you are going to have to do the download again. Thats a pain I am sitting through right now. However , thanks to the existence of the new OS on one Mac I can still give some first Impression Opinions.
I have only had the OS for a couple of hours and on first look you notice that the dock has changed , In my opinion for the better , the dock no longer has a glossy reflective finish that creates an annoying center line across the entire thing when a window is maximized. The reduced reflections make it appear a lot less cluttered and it just seems newer and fresher. The indicator light for open applications has become more subtle though and can be harder to detect when your brightness is turned up to the max(laptop). In fact turning the brightness one bar down from full just about doubles the visibility of the indicator light.
The very next thing to do is to check out the notifications center ,which had brought attention to itself about a minute after startup because one of my reminders went off. The notification center isn't all that strange or surprising if you are used to the one in iOS because it does exactly the same thing. At first boot of Mountain Lion though , the click to tweet button was not present , that had to be set up in system preferences.I found the slide to reveal on a trackpad quite entertaining (you may assume I will get over this , however elastic scrolling has never ceased to entertain me) and handy too , giving the trackpad ever more purpose on OSX.
Next on my list of things to check out was the sharing button which I tested out in Safari , Im not much of a twitter user but I do like sharing links over Messages , so thats exactly what I did , I can really see how this could be handy , however I cannot tear myself away from Chrome because to me its the prettiest browser on OSX.I hope that Chrome integrates this feature soon (that or maybe I have ignorantly overlooked a setting) because I would use it a lot.
I have only had the OS for a couple of hours and on first look you notice that the dock has changed , In my opinion for the better , the dock no longer has a glossy reflective finish that creates an annoying center line across the entire thing when a window is maximized. The reduced reflections make it appear a lot less cluttered and it just seems newer and fresher. The indicator light for open applications has become more subtle though and can be harder to detect when your brightness is turned up to the max(laptop). In fact turning the brightness one bar down from full just about doubles the visibility of the indicator light.
The very next thing to do is to check out the notifications center ,which had brought attention to itself about a minute after startup because one of my reminders went off. The notification center isn't all that strange or surprising if you are used to the one in iOS because it does exactly the same thing. At first boot of Mountain Lion though , the click to tweet button was not present , that had to be set up in system preferences.I found the slide to reveal on a trackpad quite entertaining (you may assume I will get over this , however elastic scrolling has never ceased to entertain me) and handy too , giving the trackpad ever more purpose on OSX.
Dictation is a feature I nearly forgot ,but luckily remembered . Unfortunately it isn't really a voice control system like Siri ,but letting you dictate text into any place you can type in is quite a neat feature and one that is sure to be taken advantage of by the Apple script modders out there , I would like to see how this affects the JARVIS project. I found the dictation to be pretty accurate for my South African accent (more accurate than any other voice recognition I've played with[PC]) and even if this isn't Siri on a mac , its certainly a step in the right direction.
Lastly Reminders and Notes have finally come to the Mac(Reminders was long overdue) and synchronise with all your iThingys.They do what they do on iOS and they even look the same ,I find this great but some people find the textures offensive for some reason. Messages(the replacement for iChat) implements iMessages on the Mac and apparently the messages sync up with your iThingys . I haven't had the chance to test this though because I don't know many people who own the equipment to do these things and the ones that do choose to use more cross platform means of cheap communication .
The list of features goes on but these were the main ones , because I didn't feel like writing a 24 page article and turn it into an ebook.
With all that said and done I have a big question to ask... Where is the Google+ integration? As I mentioned ,I dont really use twitter , also I would really like to put messages into the lower half of the notification center for quick access (just a thought, dock-able apps maybe?).
Mountain Lion is great and I don't regret paying the $19.99 that I did, however the upgrade may not feel necessary to some , and it wont be. I still have the feeling that most users only upgrade when they buy a new machine . I on the other hand , would prefer to do the upgrade now and look forward to getting myself an Apple TV in the future for the purposes of Air Play mirroring, and upgrading every Mac in visible distance so I dont have to see that ghastly mirror of an old dock.
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