30 New OS X Mountain Lion Features in 2 Minutes

by mproud • 14 years ago

32 69 14 years ago

cstuder• 14 years ago

Hey, Dashboard still exists.

I'm wondering why I never use it anymore. It was fun to play around with and design for, but nowadays I... well, I actually forgot the shortcut to open it.

Am I the only one?

jaems332• 14 years ago

I actually use it a few times a day to do simple things like calculations, conversion, weather forecast... then again I'm on a laptop with F4 as the Apple-set shortcut.

kule2• 14 years ago

I still use it, mainly because it's very easy to hit the F4 key to pull it up. I only use it for quick look ups - I have a conversion widget, exchange rate widget & the odd time I need to use the calculator.

sigjuice• 14 years ago

I use it all the time for various widgets - weather, calendar, network usage etc. It is just as easy to swipe horizontally with four fingers.

petercooper• 14 years ago

I played with it for 10 minutes when it first came out and since then have either disabled or hidden it. It just seems to do stuff that most people I know leave browser tabs open for instead nowadays. The calculator is rubbish (and Cmd+Space, c, enter isn't hard), Google does better work at conversions and weather, etc..

irq• 14 years ago

You don't even have to launch Calculator, you can just type mathematical expressions directly into Spotlight, and it will immediately display the result.

michaelbuckbee• 14 years ago

Dashboard is interesting as it seems like such a toy but can actually run almost anything behind the scenes, an example:

I had created a service that used distributed dashboard components to monitor mentions of you or your brand online.

Each widget had a ruby script that ran behind the scenes to do the actual checking against various RSS sources (both for that user and others) creating a really sweet distributed system for the service.

publicfig• 14 years ago

I use it for iStatPro and for the sticky notes feature. Those two thins are actually pretty useful for me. The calculator is typically useless though, and I've never found anything else that can't be solved quicker by just typing it into an address bar to put on there.

danbee• 14 years ago

I find iStat Menus much more useful.

ryannielsen3• 14 years ago

I believe it's telling that Apple's latest keyboards no longer include a Dashboard key; in its place is a Launchpad key. While I actually do use Dashboard on a regular basis (gotta check my stocks!), I don't think it's long for this world.

hollerith• 14 years ago

I never use Dashboard.

seunghomattyang• 14 years ago

Dashboard is actually one of my favorite features; I can't live without it. I use the dictionary/thesaurus widget every time I write (or read) and I take down short, temporary notes on the sticky notes. Besides that, I use the clock (to keep tabs on different time zones), weather and calendar widgets, and iStat Pro.

rimantas• 14 years ago

  > I use the dictionary/thesaurus widget every time I write
  > (or read)

When reading, try this: hover over the word and press ctrl+cmd+d.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

I've started using Dashboard a lot more since Lion where you can just 4-finger swipe to see it. I have a world clock on the very right egde of Dashboard, so I can 4-finger pull over just enough to see the clock and then go back without ever fully switching. Very handy.

I also make extensive use of the weather widget and Deliveries (package tracker).

vl• 14 years ago

I use it few times a day:

* Checking traffic (I have safari snipped to traffic website).

* Sticky notes.

* Calendar to check what is the date of specific day of some week (i.e. date for Wednesday next week).

* Clock with second hand.

* Countdown timer (installed widget - TeaTimer).

* Time in other time zones I need to know (installed widget).

* Weather.

* Snow forecast for ski resorts in season.

* And, rarely - iStat Pro.

kule2• 14 years ago

I installed the GM build on my MacBook Pro, not sure if it's just psychological but apps definitely feel snappier than in Lion.

Got caught out with one old app that didn't have a developer id (for a 3g dongle) so had to disable the gatekeeper install it then I could reapply gatekeeper.

Otherwise it's been running great for the past few days.

jasomill• 14 years ago

Control-clicking an app and choosing "Open" whitelists it even when Gatekeeper is enabled.

ComputerGuru• 14 years ago

It isn't. Snow Leopard was crazy fast, but Lion bogged down a lot. ML DP2 brought huge performance improvements, basically undoing whatever it was that Lion did.

(I'm a dev, benchmark each and every build for our custom software.)

pooriaazimi4• 14 years ago

Which MacBook Pro? I'd like to know.

I'll buy ML when it comes - I used beta 2 and 3 and they were ridiculously stable, but they weren't really as snappy as Snow Leopard on my poor 2009 15" MBP (2.53GHz C2D, with 8GB 1333 RAM and 7200rpm HDD).

jlarocco• 14 years ago

The "features" in that video are a joke.

Does anybody know if there are under the hood improvements in this version that would make upgrading worth the money?

iusable• 14 years ago

Been using it on a fully loaded macbook air. Completely anecdotal but I think my boot times are faster. But my encryption seems slower. Safari is wayyy more stable and faster. Messages is integrated better and love Notifications!

Launchpad is way smoother imho.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

Is Mission Control any faster in switching spaces? It's incredibly annoying to wait 2-3 seconds to switch spaces, every, time. Especially since it was configurable in Snow Leopard.

zarify• 14 years ago

Does Messages work through a proxy yet? That was driving me nuts when I was playing with it in beta.

CWIZO2• 14 years ago

Yeah, a list of bug fixes would be great. I'm still having issues with reconnecting (after sleep, on startup, ...) to wifi on my air. Also the problem with fans (who apparently think they are propellers on a WW2 bomber) remains to be solved. If this update fixes this I'll upgrade just for that (since apparently Apple can't be bothered to fix this issues via regular free updates).

sycren2• 14 years ago

For the fans - SMCfan - http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23049/smcfancontrol

pooriaazimi4• 14 years ago

> I'm still having issues with reconnecting (after sleep, on startup, ...) to wifi on my air

The good news is that this cancer has spread to iOS 6 as well. I curse Apple every time it happens (on my Macs or iPad) and I have to open/close the lid again and again...

< 10.1.7 was all right. I don't know what they did that caused this behavior...

whatusername• 14 years ago

There's "200+ New Features": http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html

which is even more of a joke.

ryannielsen3• 14 years ago

"Under the hood"? Not really. There are a few nifty new APIs – SceneKit, NSXPCConnection, NSUserNotification, the sharing stuff – and the 64-bit kernel (with kernel ASLR) is now the default. Regarding user-visible features, I think there are a couple nice ones:

- AirPlay mirroring is slick, especially in meeting situations

- Document auto-save and versioning are a lot less annoying and more useful

- Improved sharing support can be quite useful in many situations

- Calendar and Contacts suck less

- Gatekeeper is, I honestly believe, a solid step forward in improving system integrity and security

- iCloud sucks less and is better integrated into some system apps

- You are now notified of both system and app updates, and update checks happen daily. I think this is huge for app developers

- Preview has support for entering text in text fields of PDF documents which aren't true PDF forms (this honestly might be my single favorite Mountain Lion feature)

For $20, I think this is a solid "polish" upgrade. There's nothing mind blowing, but there's an incredible amount of polish across the system, with a few truly useful features mixed in. For me? Money well spent.

mehulkar2• 14 years ago

Integrated iMessage is all the extra features I need.

karolist• 14 years ago

AirPlay mirroring sounds nice. Could it be used to show Photoshop canvas on an iPad when drawing with wacom?

I was thinking of buying an app for this, but if Mountain Lion does that I might hold off till I upgrade.

Synaesthesia• 14 years ago

Safari uses Core Animation for rendering, much smoother scrolling. It also has a sort of "Tab expose" feature.

pooriaazimi4• 14 years ago

They've hardened OS X's security model a lot. Gatekeeper + new IPC system (XPC) is great. But the best thing is App Sandbox. They've introduced a lot of new entitlements, like "file bookmarks" that'll make it easy and virtually pain free for most apps to embrace Sandbox. Also, Sandboxed apps can now be "Scriptable" - so users can put scripts in a folder in ~/Library/User App Scripts/com.apple.qt and those scripts will execute "without" any restrictions (i.e. outside of Sandbox). The rationale is that users have intentionally put those scripts in that folder (apps don't have access to that folder), so it's OK to run them.

Application Groups: you (or OmniGroup) can mark multiple apps with the same developer ID, and they can share files, use IPC/XPC directly, a shared file system location for user data, etc.

You can watch session 700 at WWDC 2012[1] that's I (poorly) summarized above.

I think OpenGL on OS X is also upgraded to 4.0 on ML, but I'm not sure. Siracusa's review at Ars (when published later today) will tell us if it's true or not.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012/

ericHosick• 14 years ago

Most features don't seem to be core OS features except maybe this one:

"You can use Airplay as a sound output device".

Which, I am looking forward to.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

(Just as an FYI, as I was amazed to find out recently, this is available in PulseAudio as well, though it uses the old TCP protocol instead of UDP as most things tend to support).

jameswyse• 14 years ago

I tried this feature and couldn't get it to work. I have a (last-gen) airport express and also a mac htpc running airfoil speakers.

I can play to both through iTunes or Airfoil but no audio comes through when using the airplay audio out device. Hopefully this will be addressed soon.

burriko• 14 years ago

I've used the Airplay audio out a couple of times with a previous generation Airport Express and an AppleTV 2. It works well but does have very noticeable lag, making it useless for anything but playing music. The lag was far greater than that of Airplay mirroring, which I find rather odd.

Jayasimhan• 14 years ago

i think he missed Gatekeeper.

helipad• 14 years ago

The ability to bring 'Save As' back is worth the $20 alone for me.

risratorn2• 14 years ago

It's a joke they still haven't fixed the fullscreen feature rendering your second monitor useless. I can't understand why they did it that way and why it hasn't been fixed already.

illicium• 14 years ago

Everyone keeps saying this, but I think it's FUD. They've fixed the main gripe with Lion's full screen: not being able to full screen an app on the monitor of your choice (as opposed to the main monitor only). Why is the second monitor useless? I'm sure you can still drag app windows to it and interact with them.

edit: You can drag child windows of the full-screened app to the second monitor. The whole point of the full-screen mode is to isolate the app and give it exclusive focus. For everything else, there's the zoom button.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

> Why is the second monitor useless? I'm sure you can still drag app windows (as well as other apps) to it and interact with them.

Uh, no. You can't. That's the gripe. Way to be dismissive when you don't even grok the complaint.

risratorn2• 14 years ago

Well that's the real problem, you can't ... when you fullscreen an app the second monitor just displays a gray fabric background but you can't put apps, widgets, or anything else for that mater on it. It's a fail I wasn't expecting from Apple.

div• 14 years ago

Agreed, it's ridiculous. I went out and bought SizeUp which, among a ton of other window positioning shortcuts, gives me a shortcut to resize an app to fullscreen on a single monitor, without making the second monitor useless.

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

Zr40• 14 years ago

Are you sure about that? Apple lists exactly that as one of the features of Mountain Lion:

Go full screen on any display

If you have a secondary display connected to your Mac, you can take an app full screen on either display. Drag the window to the desired display and click the full-screen button.

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html#system

mdonahoe• 14 years ago

But you still can't use both screens simultaneously. One of your screens will contain a fullscreen app, and the. Other will have that linen background

Udo• 14 years ago

But the point is they still blank all the other screens.

losvedir• 14 years ago

Wow, none of those really jumped out at me as killer features. That said, I was happy with my upgrade to Snow Leopard, I think it was, when most of the new features were behind the scenes speed/stability/security fixes.

Also, off topic, but is the narrator John C. Reilly!?

beloch• 14 years ago

Could rebranding OSX to OS10 be in preparation for OS11? OSXI doesn't sound or look as good as OS11 to me. They're also almost out of large cats...

The time for OS11 is rapidly approaching. OSX has evolved substantially since its release, but is still very much the same OS. If Windows 8 is a fundamental leap (that doesn't lead to a face-plant) then OSX might soon be in the same position as OS9 was after Win95 came out. Is there another NeXTSTEP somewhere out there for Apple to buy?

mehulkar2• 14 years ago

I hear they're moving to dinosaurs and other extinct species by smoothly transitioning through the Sabretooth Cat[1].

[1] Wikipedia says the official name is Smilodon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilodon

clhodapp• 14 years ago

The rebranding is from "Mac OS X" (read Mac O S Ten) to "OS X" (read O S Ten)

siglesias• 14 years ago

I don't think that the rebranding to OS10 is factually accurate [1]. As a matter of pronunciation, OS X has always been pronounced "OS Ten" (as opposed to "OS EX").

1) See branding for Mountain Lion http://www.apple.com/osx/

metatronscube• 14 years ago

Looks like some solid improvements, especially for the price they are charging. I hope they keep pushing though, I feel it could be a little quicker (especially on my older macs) and I feel compared to Snow Leopard it is noticeably slower (things like airdrop don't work either). Performance and stability improvements would be a good next step. Easier said than done however.

Zarkonnen• 14 years ago

clutches my copy of Snow Leopard, hissing

30 New OS X Mountain Lion Features in 2 Minutes

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