I got the Mountain Lion as soon as I can and have it installed on my new Macbook Air. (Well, I have to blame Apple’s performance of sending redeem codes, which seemed to be confirmed and sent by manual. This took about 35 hours for me to get it.)
This is a simple review after 2-day usage. I call it simple, compared to some 24-page review. :)
Though there are a bunch of new features coming with Mountain Lion, I found there are almost nothing exciting for me.
Notification Center: I’ve already got Growl and it’s working fine.
Reminder: Calendar(formly known as iCal) does the same work.
Notes: Evernote are better.
Game Center: I rarely play games on Mac, and I doubt how many games support that now.
iCloud: I’ve got only one Mac. Maybe it’s unfair that many got a few Macs, but for me, it’s useless.
Messages: ASAIK, none of my friends use that.
Share/Twitter: I’m a reader more than a sharer.
There are some things should be done at the first version they appear in Lion:
Fullscreen on non-main display: Of course. I recall the embrassing moments I fullscreened the slides and they appeared on my laptop, instead of external big screen.
Search on Launchpad: Definitely there should be the search feature. But I’m already not using that which takes a lot of time to find the app. I’m using Alfred which is amazing to have the job done.
There are also bad changes from my view:
Dashboard: Seriously, the old one is better.
Notification Center icon: I don’t like the icon on right-top. There should at least be an option to remove it. I want to keep my Menubar as simple with only necessary icons.
OS X software updates: I don’t know if it’s a good change but I didn’t feel right at the first glance.
Safari
It’s said to be faster, but I’m not aware of that yet.
“Show All Tabs”: Seriously, Apple? I don’t think everything in iOS can be merged to Mac OS X (OK, it’s called OS X now). This is totally useless. There are so many ways to navigate through all tabs.
Some improvements are good and friendly, like inline progress for downloads in Finder, and Power Nap.
I would hope there is a “Disable Sharing” option for me, non-sharing people.
By far, I’ve met two problems:
The desktop number in Mission Control is not matched with the real one, as the order changed by usage frequency. It’s always 1,2,3,… while the actual order may be 1,3,2,…
Dashboard freezes all windows (Mission Control still works) until I kill DashboardClient processes sshed from another machine.
Mountain Lion is OK overall, with many minor improvements and some bugs, while the major features are not my things. This update is about iCloud and sharing. I’ll give a 4 out of 5. Hmm, it seems I prefer Lion. But well, things move on. Let me hope Apple can fix the problems and work on exciting features.