Mountain Lion review in (26) bullet points
I rode the Mountain Lion all week, on two Macs, doing serious web development and everything else: lots of work and play. The top three ML features for me?

- speed
- notifications
- power nap
But why bother sharing? What’s a hobbyist reviewer to do, when titans of tech journalism publish excellent, epic reviews before I’ve even downloaded?
Bullet points, baby. Bullet points. Mostly tweet-sized.
- So far I have no major gripes, and a generally good impression. I can’t say that the upgrade was totally painless, but close. It was certainly the least painful OS upgrade I’ve ever had.
- Mountain Lion offers something I care about a lot: speed. It seems quite a bit snappier than Lion, and it’s not just me (it’s the graphics). But there are also other speed boosts …
- 25s restart on Mountain Lion on my iMac. ~20s better than Lion? Restart speed on Retina MacBook Pro? SIXTEEN SECONDS. The rMBP was a fast restarter on Lion too, but not THAT fast. Sheesh! Too fast for a pee break.
- The Notifications activation gesture is savvy. It seems correctly special—different from other gestures. I like using it.
- Notifications is limited so far, but I really appreciate what it is and where it’s headed. It feels really overdue.
- Power Nap is only available for the newest Macs, but I have one of those. It’s handy to have mail, message, downloads and other syncable data waiting for you when you open your laptop. But it’s more than that.
- Power Nap changes the feel of a laptop. It’s always ready. It’s working for you, even when it’s closed and cool on the desk. It’s alive! It matters, and it’s a great feature.
- AirPlay Mirroring is groovy, but the use cases are fairly limited. I’m mainly interested in extending my desktop — not reflecting it.
- Document saving and versioning has certainly been clarified. It is now what it probably “should” have been in Lion. He says like a know-it-all.
- I admit it: I was really relieved to get ⌘⇧⌥-S back. I’ve been using it since the mid 80s or something. UPDATE: except, oh wait, it’s futterly ucked. That is a bit grim. And the first thing in Mountain Lion that makes me all head explodey. Can’t believe I missed it. APPLE, GEEZ!
- Renaming in the window title bar is weird but great. It’s the file name; you should be able to interact with it. Now you can.
- Much worries me about saving docs in iCloud. But it sure shines in one way: apps “owning” their docs makes it is super easy to find new docs. That will be great for beginners.
- Major iCloud docs annoyance: they are invisible to tools like LaunchBar. And that’s a deal-breaker for me. I will avoid it.
- Ubiquitous sharing options with single-sign on are nice, but also just feel very “about bloody time”…and still not done. “Share anything,” Apple? Er, no. Also…
- Twitter notifications in Mountain Lion is nice, but…clicking an item sends me to…to…it’s almost too terrible to say! TO TWITTER.COM! (There should really, really be an option to choose your own Twitter app.)
- Die die die skeuomorphism! Apple, I do not need to type on a “index card” to share. Who ever shared anything on index cards anyway?
- Address Book, reborn as Contacts, seems nearly as awkward as ever. However, you can at least see groups and contacts at the same time again.
- Well, widgets are better. That’ll be great for the 12 people who still use widgets.
- Quite odd that Apple is advertising Facebook integration months before it’s actually available. Can’t recall them doing that with a big feature before.
- Wow, I sure would be happy with Mountain Lion if I was Chinese!
- Progress bars on icons = simple, good idea. I’ve already appreciated it several times now.
- As expected, Mountain Lion does get in your face with more security issues. In particular, it often wants to know if you want allow an app access to your contacts. In fact, they usually just want want access to your “me” card — not everyone else. But it’s super unclear, and I can see it causing lots of unnecessary worry.
- What app/system settings are syncing via iCloud now? I do not know. Some obviously are. This is good, but it’s also rather unclear.
- Launchpad search is a small thing that makes a big difference in the usability of Launchpad. Now it’s like a highly specialized version of LaunchBar, just for your apps. So much better.
- The integration of all software updates in the App Store is a nice improvement. That was quite an awkward phase we had there for a while, with two different places to go for updates.
- So this was a big ML moment for me: OS X ML has no Web Sharing GUI. That is, you can no longer render web pages on your Mac by flipping a switch. Of course, it really is (er, was) just a checkbox for “apachectl start/stop”. Learned me some Apache for kicks. Here’s Apple’s very brief non-explanation for Web Sharing’s absence in 10.8.
There’s quite a bit more, of course. But this is ain’t my day job!