DACS General Meeting
October 2012
Meeting Review:
Introducing OS X Mountain Lion

By Frank Kromer

Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion (version 10.8) is the ninth major release of OS X running Mac computers.  It was released on July 25, 2012 and most recently updated in September 2012.  There were 3,000,000 downloads of OS X in the first four days following introduction - Apple’s most successful Mac release to date.

Apple’s Dave Marra spoke.  He is a long time representative for Apple (I think he said since 1991) and has conducted many presentations such as this one he for us (his fourth presentation for DACS).

Dave announced at the outset there were over 200 new features in OS X Mountain Lion and he intended to cover ten of them for us.  He spoke very fast to cram as much as he could in a little over one hour and a half.  During his presentation I tried my best to capture the essence of what Dave had to say and display. (Unfortunately, Apple does not give out their slides which if they were available would make it a lot easier to review the presentation).

Mountain Lion succeeds Lion, and Dave recapped Lion but I won’t go there.  Moving on to Mountain Lion, Dave covered iCloud, iMessage (which is now known as Messages), Notifications, Power Nap, integration with Facebook, Sharing, Game Center integration, Safari, Dictation and Air Play mirroring.  One thing that you realize listening to Dave is that with Mountain Lion the Mac has become more like the operating system (IOS) for iPhones, iPads and the iPod Touch.  Since I use the Mac, iPhone and iPad, for me this is a good thing.

Now to the guts of Dave’s presentation and demonstrations:

With Mountain Lion, iCloud is now integrated with your computer, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.  That means your email accounts, contacts, calendars, notes and reminders are all synced with one another through iCloud.  Dave made special mention of documents in iCloud and used Apple’s word processing app, Pages, as a demo.

With Mountain Lion, Messages now comes to the Mac.  It had been available since 2011 to iPhone users.  Significant is that Messages transfers data via the internet so users do not incur text charges.  Also significant is that you can transfer files up to 100MB in Messages.  I have already used that feature, and it is very useful.

Notifications appear in the upper right corner of the screen of your Mac when email is received, calendar events occur, etc.  Dave demonstrated notifications and the Notification Center which he showed is easily accessible.

Power Nap is a feature that lets you keep your Mac up to date even while it sleeps.  It works only with Macs that have a flash drive.

Dave made integration with Facebook a feature separate from Sharing and although I am very much into sharing I am not a regular on Facebook.  You can add accounts for Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo and Facebook in your Mail, Contacts and Calendars.  Preferences and those accounts become available in the Share menus.

Sharing is really easy under Mountain Lion.  It is totally built into the Mac with Mountain Lion.  This makes it easier to share files, photos, etc. much like on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.  Dave demonstrated Sharing in Safari by composing text, adding a bookmark, adding the page to a Reading List, and then used the Share button to send a link via Messages or to send the page via email.  As previously mentioned, Sharing also involves integration with social networks.

The Game Center app used in IOS devices comes to the Mac with Mountain Lion.  Not a whole lot more to say about this.

Dave displayed changes in Safari including an iCloud icon, the combination of the search box and address bar into one box, a Safari Reader button, new Tab views, Reading List and the new Share button previously discussed.

Mountain Lion’s Dictation is similar to the one in the new iPad (but it’s not Siri).  Dave demonstrated how it works by tapping the function key twice and then dictating.  Anywhere you can type text on your Mac Mountain Lion lets you dictate rather than type.  Dictation requires an internet connection.

Air Play permits you to mirror whatever is on your Mac on a television set connected with an AppleTV device.  Previously, this feature was available on the iPad.

In capsule form, the above are the features covered by Dave.  In his presentation, Dave also talked about zooming in and out. In Text Edit, he demonstrated the various motions available with a trackpad. He also covered the markup tools in Preview, the option in Safari “not to track me” under the privacy preference, Apple’s Accessibility Preference, the use of Air Drop to share between two Macs located close to one another without any connection, and more features for which I could not write fast enough to keep up with him.

I have used Mountain Lion since its introduction in July, and I like it a lot.  After hearing Dave’s presentation, I realize there is much to this OS that I don’t know, and want to learn.

Want more information on Mountain Lion?  In response to a question, Dave suggested the tutorial found under the Help menu (found on the Finder tool bar - just click on Help Center and Mountain Lion info is displayed).  You might also check out the Apple website which has a section on the features of OS X Mountain Lion.  Finally, I find the October issue of Macworld very useful as it contains a 27 page special report on OS X Mountain Lion or you can buy a tutorial by ScreenCastsOnLine for $5.99 from the App Store.

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