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Mountain Lion makes your Mac a bit more like an iPad
by Alan Zisman (c) 2012
First
published in Business in
Vancouver August 9, 2012 Issue #1189 High Tech
Office column
A few years back, Apple dropped the word “computer” from its corporate
name, a reflection of the growth of mobile devices. In the company’s
2012 third quarter, Apple sold 43 million iPhones and iPads versus four
million Macs.
Mac sales, however, are continuing to grow at a time when sales of PCs
overall are flat. Now Apple has fast-tracked development of the OS X
operating system for its Macintosh computers, releasing the latest
version – OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion – on July 25, just a year after the
previous version, Lion.
Lion added features to make desktop and notebook Macs look and feel
more like iOS-powered iPads and dropped compatibility with some older
Mac applications. Quite a few Mac-users resisted its charms, choosing
to stick with 2009’s OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Mountain Lion continues the iOS-ification trend. Some of it is simple
renaming: what used to be “Address Book,” “iCal” and “iChat” are now
“Contacts,” “Calendar” and “Messaging” like on the iPad and iPhone. New
on the Mac are iOS Reminders and Notes. iPad-like AirPlay Mirroring
lets users wirelessly display presentations, videos and more on an HDTV
screen (making use of Apple’s $99 iTV) – but this only works on recent
Macs.
Save a note on your Mac and it appears on your iPad via the iCloud
service – one of the ways Mountain Lion ties Macs and iOS devices
together. Contacts, calendar entries and Safari bookmarks are similarly
synched. Apple applications now offer to save documents to iCloud’s
Document Library.
Also new to the Mac but familiar to iOS device owners: a Sharing button
in application toolbars. Click on this icon to share current content –
to an email message, a social media site or other options. Apple has
integrated Twitter support throughout Mountain Lion; Facebook support
is promised. Both the Sharing button and iCloud saving should appear in
third-party apps soon.
Among what Apple claims as 200 new features is system-wide dictation,
giving users the option to speak instead of typing into any
application. Important caveat – this only works when the computer has
an online connection. Security feature Gatekeeper limits software
installations to those applications sold by Apple and its registered
developers.
Like Lion, Mountain Lion does not support Mac applications developed
for older PowerPC processors. If you rely on these you should either
avoid Mountain Lion or look for replacement for those applications.
I had some applications that ran fine under Lion – including Parallels
virtualization software and the utility to connect to DropBox’s online
storage – that failed after I installed Mountain Lion; downloading
newer versions corrected these incompatibilities. (RoaringApps.com is
collecting compatibility reports and may be worth a visit first.)
You won’t find boxed versions of Mountain Lion for sale at retail
outlets; it’s only available as a four-gigabyte, $20 download from
Apple’s App Store (or pre-installed on a new Mac). A purchase for
personal use can be installed on as many Macs as you own. Upgrading is
smooth and takes an hour or two.
Mountain Lion is a relatively modest evolution of Lion. In my tests, it
seems faster and more stable. For those reasons – and the low price – I
recommend it for any Mac owner running Lion. If you’re still running OS
X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you can upgrade directly to Mountain Lion. But if
you chose to avoid Lion, you may choose to avoid Mountain Lion as well.
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