Tag Archives: Mac OS X

08.02.12
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Mountain Lion – Worth The Upgrade?

First off, you’ll be wanting to know whether it’s worth the upgrade. Sconce Wednesday I have spoken to several people who were umm-ing and ahh-ing about making the jump. Well let me say this, for £13.99 ($19.99 in the US) there isn’t really an excuse not to!

Mountain Lion

Yes, it may be another incremental update to the OS, just like Snow Leopard from Leopard and even like Lion but I prefer it this way, it’s cheaper to upgrade and Apple fine tune features over a longer period of time. Meaning less bugs with each overhaul of OSX.

Apple’s desktop OS hasn’t had ‘Mac’ in the title for some time now and the lines running between the iPad and Mac get even blurrier with this iteration. It’s worth the upgrade if just for the little features, if you have a Mac which was purchased in 2011, there’s an even better reason to upgrade…

That’s AirPlay Mirroring.

It’s also the one feature I can’t benefit from. Since selling my MacBook Air, my only mac is my 2010 iMac which isn’t quite powerful enough, even though the phone in my pocket and the iPad I’m typing this on IS.

If you’ve used AirPlay on an iOS device, it works the same way in Mountain Lion. Audio can be streamed to any AirPlay devices you have (AirPort Express, Speakers or Apple TV) but the greatest feature is Mirroring, which allows you to stream your desktop over wifi to your Apple TV (2/3rd Gen) sharing photos, music, your desktop and any video, whether it’s YouTube, ITunes or even a generic flash player!

I haven’t been able to test this but I’ve heard that it works perfectly and is a much needed addition to the OS.

The best new features are all little things,

Safari’s new tab viewer (below) is found by using a two-finger swipe, almost zooming out when in Safari. This gives you a view of open tabs reminiscent of the iPhone’s view.

Safari

Whilst we’re on the subject of swiping…

If you have a trackpad (who still uses a mouse?!) take two fingers and swipe from the right edge… Quick access to Notification Center is granted!! Here you’ll see any notifications you haven’t acknowledged and a quick way to tweet or post to Facebook.

Speaking of which, you can now share things to twitter/Facebook from pretty much everywhere in the OS. Safari let’s you share the page you’re viewing, Finder lets you share images with a simple right click too! Have a play around and see what else you can share!!

Those are just a few new features and there are plenty more for you to find so I’ll leave the rest for you! Enjoy Mountain Lion!!

06.19.11
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OS X Lion – Preview [Part 1]

I don’t know where to start with Lion, it’s the simple changes which make all the difference. Some features I find pointless on my iMac but some are amazing on my MacBook Air and to start, I’m just going to talk about the little things which make OS X Lion special.

Keyboard Accentuations

First off, something which is a long time coming. If you need to type café and want to put the accent over the letter you simply hold down the letter on the keyboard and you get several options! Simply hit the relevant number and you get the accented letter.

It works for pretty much all languages and if you need more options, simply add more languages to your Keyboard Settings. Greek, French, Spanish, Latin, you name it they’re all there.

The next handy feature I’ve found is Spotlight Previews – When you search for a file using Spotlight, sometimes it’s hard to find the right file.

Spotlight Preview

Now, simply hovering your mouse over the search results will show live previews of each of the documents, images and files. Kinda like ‘Quick Look’ but right from the search results!

Good eh?

More will follow as I start collating all the new stuff I find and I will do an iCloud specific post talking about iOS and Lion’s use of the new iCloud service.