Mountain Lion - Thumbs Up

Anthony Parsons

Well-known member
Just upgraded Lion.... overall, a nice improvement and what Lion should have been from the get go.

Sending SMS from your computer to any iPhone / iPad is a nice feature... though I wouldn't piss on the dictator, as it is slow if your typing skills are adequate. It doesn't dictate as you go, it records everything you say, you finish, then it starts dictating via an online translate function back at Apple. So you need a connection on the device for that feature. Typing is faster though IMO.

Overall though... a really nice streamline of Lion itself.
 
I'm very tempted to upgrade my Mom's laptop to Mountain Lion purely for the dictation function, I hear it's pretty good.

Her poor typing skills is one of the major barriers of getting her to communicate with friends and family long distances away via email, if the dictation works well it could be perfect for her.

With regards to sms - can you actually send sms messages from your phone number using ML? And does it sync up instantly with your iphone?
 
It's iMessages - they behave like SMS on iPhones (and iPads) but are free (you need an active Internet connection, however). Apple merged iMessages now, so you can send from iPad, iPod touch and iPhone and it will reach the Apple-ID rather than a phone number (or the Apple-ID). That means, if you text your friend iPhone2iPhone, you'll send the iMessage to his mobile phone number. It will appear on his MLion-enabled Mac too.
 
Honestly, as someone who really doesn't use social media much and all and could care less about icloud (or whatever it's called) I have a hard time finding anything new in ML. I guess this update is not meant for "people like me", nor was the one before this (lion).

As a power user I feel heavily neglected by Apple :(. Seems to be the same story all over though, Microsoft is neglecting their power users with Windows 8 (Metro) and so from what I heard things aren't much better in Linux land (with Gnome dumbing down their entire user interface).

I get why it's happening, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I'd really like someone at apple to just raise there hand and ask "ehh.. why can't we just make it OPTIONAL".
 
Well, I like the new notification center. You have to dismiss calendar entries so there's no way you'll ever miss an appointment again. And it checks for updates on the Mac App Store and tells you if it's worth the afford to open it.

We got our "Save as..."-function back (Cmd+Shift+S) and MLion is a lot faster than Lion. I feel like Lion was Apple's Vista.
 
I dont think its that great an update like someone mentioned barely anything has been added or improved just seems to be mainly facebook/twitter integration they are pushing. Personally i think its a very lazy revision and apple like to go on about being innovators!
 
Well, I like the new notification center. You have to dismiss calendar entries so there's no way you'll ever miss an appointment again. And it checks for updates on the Mac App Store and tells you if it's worth the afford to open it.

We got our "Save as..."-function back (Cmd+Shift+S) and MLion is a lot faster than Lion. I feel like Lion was Apple's Vista.

I did an upgrade, not a clean install. I can't say I have noticed any speed improvements, what I have noticed is that my fan goes crazy every now and then (even though the CPU usage is normal) and I get frequent crashes when exiting the screensaver. I guess I should do a clean install but still, not impressed.

I didn't know about the "Save as" feature as I tend to use apps that were not made by Apple, but I'm glad to hear they listened to at least some of the feedback.

I'm honestly still annoyed that they remove the mouse acceleration API. The mouse movement in OSX is absolutely atrocious, but at least with the API there were apps you could use to work around that. Now I use a programmable logitech mouse and a small script that effectively disables any sort of acceleration on OSX, which is by no means ideal.

I love OSX in general, I just wish their idea of updates didn't consist of removing power-user features.
 
Having the fan going crazy is a common issue after an OS X upgrade. I did a clean-install on my MacBook Pro and an upgrade on my 27" iMac - both are a lot faster now in general tasks like starting apps.

I honestly dont really care about mouse speed acceleration because I'm using the trackpad which is in my opinion by far superior to any mouse (well, mice dont really work on OS X... since at least Leopard).

Save as is as far as I know no new menu item but the hotkey is back.

Maybe you should start the Activity Monitor, display all processes and sort by CPU usage - here you should find what makes your fans spin like crazy. Once you fix that problem, maybe you also see the performance improvement :)
 
The iMessages are fantastic. No more running to my phone for reading SMS from my wife... it just pops up on my screen and good to respond.

Yeah imessage is quite nice :) Unfortunately I can't really use it unless I want to run Adium, Skype and iMessage all side by side. Hopefully it'll support WLM soon so I can dump Adium (I could care less about WLM but unfortunately many of my contacts think otherwise).
 
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