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Roundup of OS X Mountain Lion Reviews: 'Faster and Smoother', 'Incremental', 'Bargain at Twice the Price'

KurtangleTN said:
Oh my god I can't believe how magical and absolutely brilliant the twitter integration is.. absolutely stunning. It is unbelievable, one of the best things I've ever seen and it's really a game changer!!!!!!! :apple::apple::apple:
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You're kidding ain't you? The Twitter (and later on Facebook) integration was one of the biggest selling points to me. Problem is Notification Centre only notifies you of mentions or direct messages and not new tweets, making it almost useless! If you wanted access to all your tweets you'd have to install an external Twitter client making the whole Twitter integration thing pointless!

Notification Centre was one of the biggest things I was looking forward to and has turned out to be the biggest disappointment. :(

No 3rd party apps are using it either arguably making Growl more useful yet I don't want to be running both (especially when I prefer the way NC does it).

Also the lack of magic mouse gesture for NC is stupid. I installed Better Touch Tool and added a gesture (two finger swipe down) for NC easily so they can't see it's too hard to make one.

The dock style is arguably a step backwards in terms of aesthetics. All in all I don't see what I was so excited for. Other than the new Safari (which I could've used in Lion anyway) it feels kinda unfinished to me. Still worth the money as it was so cheap and I don't regret upgrading (performance is a little better as well so far) but while it's a solid OS it's not quite as amazing as I expected it to be. Hoping that will change.
 
Mattie Num Nums said:
Lion wasn't usable until 10.7.3 and Snow Leopard wasn't usable intil 10.6.8.

Apple rushed both OS's and don't tell me I am full of it etc. As I pointed out before it took 3 OS revisions before something simple like AD worked and with 10.6 it took 8 revisions to get it to finally work good. 10.6.8 is Apple's best OS in a long time but that doesn't take away the fact that it took 8 major revisions to get it to work.
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I couldn't disagree more. 10.7 had some hiccups (and still does) but I was running 10.6 the day it was released and it was easily the most stable OS I have ever used from day 1.
 
You fail it!

Piggie said:
Will Apple ever change the stupid idea of the menu bar at the top of the screen all the time?

It's obvious why it was designed this way.

Years ago screen real estate was at a premium, every pixel/scan line counted and to have menus on every window would of meant less room for windows on screen, so let's just have the one menu. So on our small, low res screens it will work better.

And that is a fair and good way of thinking.
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Read some of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menu_bar

Note the part about "Fitt's Law." It has nothing to do with screen real estate. I'm not even defending whether or not it's the best way of doing things (I prefer it, although it kinda sucks in some multimonitor setups) but saying, "It's obvious why it was designed this way." when you have no idea what you're talking about is ridiculous.
 
I've had the mountain lion desktop on my imac for 4 months now so the upgrade should be pretty seamless for me.
 
I've never seen such a smooth and fast OS in a LOOOONG time with Mountain Lion! You guys must have defective Macs!
 
listen all you motha f*ckas

Fact: Lion wasn't polished. One year was not enough time.
Fact: Mountain Lion is better.

Period. What the hell is wrong with everyone? Also, yes, maybe osx's UI is becoming dated. Win8 live tiles sounds nice.
 
As someone who has three Macs, and has just finished the updating process, a few observations.

Safari is definitely faster on all three, It's very noticeably quick at loading pages and at searches.

Boot times for both my imac and my MBP remain around the same as they were with Lion, but my MBA which was always the faster anyway (SSD etc.) is even faster, booting fully in under 9 seconds.

The wifi on my MBP which was always the slower of the three whether cabled or over a wifi connection has a marked increase in online speed.

Overall performance in day to day tasks is improved on all three machines, and multi-tasking is showing a big improvement over Lion.

Maybe this is just me, but whilst mirroring works on all three, and I stream to 2 ATV 3's, I get a "windowed" display on both my Sony Bravia 46" and an older 32" LCD panel n the bedroom...Sharp and clear, but occupying about one quarter of the screen on both.

Mail is a big disappointment as far as I'm concerned...No change in features or appearance really, and I'll be sticking with Thunderbird as my primary email client.

I think the Notifications feature is going to be something you either love or hate...personally I like it, although it's very IOS and points the direction in which Apple are heading in future. Integration of reminders and notes is useful rather than a quantum leap forward.

There are still features we have all yet to try and get used to, Apps which are not yet ML compatible etc. but from an "Under the hood" point of view I think it's a good step forward from Lion.

Edit:

Mirroring works in full screen on my older flat panel which streams through an ATV3 via wifi. I think the reason it won't go full screen on the Sony is due to the fact that I have the ATV connected to my Onkyo AV unit rather than directly into an HDMI port on the TV itself. There may be a setting on the Onkyo to acheive full screen, but if not, direct connection seems to be the way to go.
 
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SpiderDude said:
Also, please bring back the downvoting. I'm pretty sure lot's of people wouldn't agree with what I said...

Mac'on
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Amin! The fact that you can only agree/like or have neutral opinion on comments, but not dislike..... its PRETTY STUPID!!

Admins.... bring back the comment downvoting! People should be able to dislike a comment! Sorry for the unrelated subject.
 
I have just been using it for less than 24 hours, and have already fallen in love with Mountain Lion. Everything is far more responsive and far more stable than Lion and the difference is so significant even though I only have early 2011 MBP with 2.3 i5. Scrolling through webpages and forums have never been smoother on my MBP, and streaming a 1080p HD video is lightning fast even though I only have a slow network at home.

I wanted to sell off my MBP when using Lion, but now everything is the best I have ever been on.
 
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I have to say, Mountain Lion just might be as good as Snow Leopard. After the debacle that was Lion, I was starting to lose faith in Apple and thought it was apparent all they cared about was iOS.

I do get a kick out of all the haters saying "lol, Apple users pay for service packs" when they have to spend upwards of $200 just to upgrade their OS.
 
Swift said:
Yeah, it's really weird to hear tech reporters get all huffy, like some kind of aesthetic mortal sin has been committed. Hey, smart guys, you've got Address Book (now Contacts) on a dock and in the Applications folder. How do you propose a clear icon that has a meaning pre-established with 90% of the audience. If they're reading a book, how about a... book icon? It's appalling how dubious commands from the oh-so-clever tech journalists become gospel. Yeah, that's what I want: an icon that has no reference to the real world use of the program: it's like a book, see? And it has page numbers and type and all that. Duh. You want a icon that shows it as a big computer? Go back to the beginning of icons. OF COURSE icons speak non-verbally. You're not criticizing fine art. This is a computer program with visual signals. I'm sure users are very grateful for this visual clue.
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Well by your logic you'd be fine with the Desktop looking like an Office Desk :rolleyes:

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milo said:
Wow, you totally miss the point, did you even read the reviews? It has nothing to do with the icons for any of those apps.

The complaints are about the things like fake leather stitching, fake torn pages, and a window that looks like a book that locks out the ability to resize the individual panes in contacts. Partly it's ugly, and partly it's wasted screen space and lost functionality.

The guys complaining are absolutely right.
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It's all part of the dummification of Operating Systems in general and OS X in particular.
 
FSMBP said:
You can still think something is good and be critical. And you should actually read my post before posting a response that has nothing to do with it; the Gizmodo article points on how stupid iMessage looks in fullscreen. It is a complete waste of real estate; it looks like they shoe-horned it into fullscreen.

LOL.
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Then don't use it that way! :eek:

I don't plan to
 
Mac21ND said:
Disagree with Gizmodo. Windows 8 is a nice idea, but man it's going to confuse the living heck out of lots of casual Windows users. (Like the secretaries in my office. I feel bad for our IT department.)
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Maybe it will but they have no choice considering most will never like rabid dogs change over to Mac. :rolleyes:
 
NickFalk said:
Agree completely, Apple has some work cut out to make OSX more useful with a multiple monitor setup. I've actually stopped using more than one monitor when developing because of this!
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It just amazes me that they haven't done ANYTHING about it in the past decade. They come up with all these weird new features (many near useless, IMO) and they haven't figured out that multiple monitors need multiple controls to avoid wasting time or maybe something as simple as offering a dual-pane mode for the finder (or a set it up yourself, but lock & save the window location so it always comes up the way YOU want like say a 3-way backup/network copy setup, etc.) would be extremely useful to some of us? I really wonder sometimes if the people that develop these features actually USE the operating system on a daily basis or they'd have to notice these things.

Couldn't disagree more. As the menu always available on top of the screen means you will never have to aim the pointer, rather just make a quick flick of the wrist and the pointer will immediately come to a stop at the menu bar. I would wholeheartedly claim that this is one of the biggest traditional design flaws in Windows.
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Well, I'm not arguing the merits of the location so much as pointing out that I don't have to move the mouse over to another screen to access the menu bar. I have mixed feelings about the top location. On a reasonable sized monitor (or with a quick moving pointer), the top location is nice for the reason you mention; it's easy to aim for in a repetitive environment. OTOH, as you increase the resolution for the desktop, it gets to be more and more of a hassle to move the pointer so far for quick repetitive operations, IMO and starts to become a detriment.

There's still a simple solution and that is some configurability OPTIONS for the user to set based on their needs. Have an option to turn on menu bars for each monitor. Have an option for multiple docks on each screen (with either clone OR individual docks for development where set apps are typically used on a given monitor. THEN, if the user needs a certain setup for development or whatever or just general use habits, they can do it instead of having to work with whatever half-arse thing Apple throws at them. I simply can't fathom how Apple could think Mission Control is a good idea (duplicates the dock functions just to appear more like an iPad) YET they don't give any menu bar or dock configuration options. I know Apple has always sucked about options, but if they really want a more USEFUL OS, they should consider it.

wovel said:
The menu bar will now come up on whatever screen you put the full screen app on. Of course this is more of an insult to injury kind of things.
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Is that new to Mountain Lion? I'm still using Snow Leopard on my MBP and have only used Lion on a few friends' computers. What about windowed mode? Is the menu bar still on the primary monitor? I suppose a menu bar for a full screen app is better than nothing, though.
 
MagnusVonMagnum said:
There's also the matter of the menu bar only being on on monitor. How RIDICULOUS is it in 2012 to have a setup with 4 monitors and having to move the mouse at LEAST 2 monitors over to get to the freaking menu bar controls??? WTF can't they have an option to put the menu bar on EACH SCREEN? :confused:
...
This is where Windows has always been LIGHT YEARS ahead of OSX in that its menu bar controls are on each windows title bar rather than at the top of the screen. Microsoft even figured out it'd be handier yet to have the controls where you can get to them even faster (ribbons)....
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Having the menu bar at the very top makes it an infinitely deep mousing target. It might be nice to have it on each screen though, or something like that, I agree with you there. Personally I hate the ribbon interface, I've never come to good terms with it in any application, not just Office. Perhaps that's just what I'm used to... :rolleyes:
 
Hands down the best OS to date. The speed is amazing compared to Lion. The stability of Mountain Lion very much so reminds me of the Tiger days. The animations are only cool when they are dependable and not glitchy. Mountain Lion accomplishes this beautifully. For the record, Apple isn't running out of ideas. They are learning to integrate products into a more consistent environment. They have done this for years. Part of product design is the ability to take something simple and make it not only simpler but also better. They are achieving this by maintaining a consistent user experience between OS X and iOS. This is the reason for the feature adopting between the two OS's. If you don't like it, tough. It's the best decision for a constantly changing, progressive company in order for them to stay on top of their game.
 
RHatton said:
Hands down the best OS to date. The speed is amazing compared to Lion. The stability of Mountain Lion very much so reminds me of the Tiger days.
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Too bad I have to choose between losing several software packages and being up-to-date. It's at least possible for me to get a newer Microsoft Office and Photoshop (LOTS of $$$$ between the two of them, though), but older games would be unplayable with the loss of Rosetta and several games (e.g. Jedi Knight series) would become unplayable even with the Intel binaries from what I've read (they just don't work starting with Lion). The only way to keep playing them would be to get/use the Windows versions (straight forward to do with the Steam games I've purchased as they are included, but not Mac only games).

Sadly, all of this would have been a non-issue if Apple had simply kept support for Rosetta (at least as a user installed option). Heck, I could at least keep a virtualized Snow Leopard around if Apple would allow it to be used with VMWare Fusion (I'd have to get a hold of the Server version to use it).

Unlike hardware, all software doesn't become useless over time. Games, in particular are often still fun many years later. I don't know why Apple insists on going to the bother of creating something like Rosetta, only to dump it and all the software that came prior. They could have at least offered the code to the community to maintain or at least a virtualized environment for it to run in (i.e. older software like games don't need the whole OS updated to run).

So while I'd like to try out Mountain Lion on my MBP, I don't see it being worth it due to the high costs of replacing Photoshop and Office and having to boot into Windows to run games that used to run in OSX. Sadly, at some point, I'll probably be forced to anyway since newer software in the Mac world often doesn't support older OS versions (Apple doesn't help this when they wholesale dump support in their development tools for them).
 
tshrimp said:
But I don't want a Phone OS on my desktop. :( But I will still be upgrading :)
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Agree +++

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apolloa said:
So is Mountain Lion worth it? What is it going to offer my 2010 MB Pro with a soon to be SSD over my Lion I have?
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Don't know about computers with SSD, but on my early 2008 MacBook Pro with a non-SSD 200GB hard disk (40GB free), ML has finally brought back the speed and smooth working I was used to with Snow Leopard.

Even MS Office 2011 (I use excel and sometimes PowerPoint) seems much quicker and smoother...

(Only thing I miss is Exposé-Spaces as it used to be in SL, and I don't see a lot of benefit in having iOs on my desktop).
 
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