Mountain Lion — The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

I’ve been using Mountain Lion, the new version of the Macintosh operating system, for less than a day so this isn’t intended to be detailed (see John Siracua’s review) or thorough. I have, however, kicked the proverbial tyres so here are a few, quick thoughts.

Good

  • Probably the most stable 10.x.0 release I’ve used
  • Little earth shattering but lots of really nice improvements, not all of which I’ve seen documented (for example, attachments in Mail now appear in the “All My Files” view in the Finder, multiple Time Machine disks)
  • Notification Center works well; AirPlay mirroring is going to be really useful
  • I’ve not found any software that worked in Lion that no longer works. That includes stuff like VMWare (scary because it’s low-level) and Photoshop Elements 6 which is not listed on Roaring Apps compatibility list

Bad

  • You’re not going to be able to make the best use of everything until iOS 6 comes out. This is a bit of a pain if you own a first generation iPad and know that this will never happen…
  • The installer got confused. After “less than a minute remaining” it went to “-1 minutes remaining.” It got to -7 before finally resetting to twenty minutes. It worked in the end so clearly this isn’t a “show stopper” but anything weird in a process that reconfigures your system is disconcerting
  • I launched Mail. It upgraded my database successfully and then, while I was making a cup of coffee, crashed. It’s been stable ever since, but first impressions and all that
  • Every time I click on Messages — the new iChat — it opens the instant message (“Messages”) window. Do Not Want

Ugly

  • The font in the new Notes app. What were they thinking?!
  • If you didn’t like the iOS-ification of Lion you’re not going to like Mountain Lion any better. But if that’s the case you’d probably start thinking about migrating to another platform!

But overall, at less than £15 it’s a no-brainer if you use your Mac a lot.