30 New OS X Mountain Lion Features in 2 Minutes

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.

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/

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

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.

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).

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

which is even more of a joke.

"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.

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/

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

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

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/

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

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.)

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).

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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

I never use Dashboard.

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.

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).

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.

(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).

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.