OS X Mountain Lion is Apple’s brand-new operating system released today, it has over 200 new features and further integrates the world of Mac OS X and iOS. While there are a lot of features that are great, I think there are five key features that make Mountain Lion a must-have upgrade.
1. Notification Center
Just like on iOS, notifications from all your different applications will show up here and you can customize how they appear. There is one minor complaint that I have with this feature, it seems that you have to start your two finger swipe off of the trackpad and then swipe to the left if you try to swipe right to left directly on the trackpad Notification Center won’t show up.
2. Gatekeeper
This is probably one of the most important features for the casual user. Gatekeeper will help protect those users who go wild when downloading stuff on the internet. If you really can’t trust yourself you can set it to only allow you to download applications from the Mac App Store. You can still control click on anything you’ve downloaded and click open to go around your settings if you don’t want to change them just to open one file.
3. Messages
Messages is great for people who have their iPhones synced up with iCloud. You can start a conversation on your iPhone or Mac and pick it back up later on either platform. The best part about it is that it’s free, the only downside is that both users need to have iPhones.
4. Sharing
Sharing is another great feature for people who love to share pictures and links through email and social media. Apple is working on supporting this share feature in almost every app, although as of now I can only use it in iPhoto and Safari. I really hope this feature can be incorporated into Google Chrome at some time since that is my primary web browser. The only downside is that it lacks Facebook integration right now, although that should be released later this fall, probably along side the release of iOS 6.
5. Dictation
Dictation is probably my favorite feature of OS X Mountain Lion. It’s basically Siri on a Mac, but with a few more of the bugs worked out. All you have to do is hit the function key twice in any text field and the little Dictation icon will appear, then all you have to do is say what you would like to type and hit enter and it appears in the text field. It’s not perfect by any means but I think that is the best feature of OS X Mountain Lion. Hell, I wrote this whole article using it.
Honorable mention: AirPlay Mirroring
Since I don’t have an Apple TV I haven’t been able to test out this feature yet, but it is one of the better features within Mountain Lion. AirPlay Mirroring gives you the ability to wirelessly stream what’s on your Mac to your TV. Here are the specs for the Macs that support AirPlay Mirroring: iMac (Mid 2011 or newer), Mac mini (Mid 2011 or newer), MacBook Air (Mid 2011 or newer), and MacBook Pro (Early 2011 or newer) with Mountain Lion.
