Lab Test Software : OS X Mountain Lion

Apple’s latest desktop OS brings about useful new features, but it still needs further refinement.

OS X Mountain Lion

Mountain Lion, OS X 10.8, is the ninth major release of OS X, Apple’s OS for Mac computers. First announced earlier this year in February, it was officially made available through the Mac App Store on July 25. Interestingly, Mountain Lion is the first Mac OS to be available exclusively through the Mac App Store, and won’t be available as a physical purchase. At $25.98, it is also the most affordable OS upgrade from Apple yet.

Installing Mountain Lion was а fuss-free process. However, depending on your Internet connection, downloading the installer from the Mac App Store could take some time since the installer comes at around 4.4GB. Once downloaded, it takes an additional 45 minutes to an hour for the entire installation process to complete.

Apple proclaims that Mountain Lion has over "200 new features". But most of the changes were done under the hood, and from first glance at least, Mountain Lion doesn’t look any different.

Опе of the more noticeable features of Mountain Lion has got to be the new Notification center. It works like а combination of the popular Mac notification app Growl, and Notification center on your iOS device. Alerts from your apps appears as pop-ups, and you can invoke the Notification Center either by clicking on the iсоn on the top right hand corner of your screen, or by swiping left from the right edge of your track pad with two fingers.

iMessage is still a bit buggy at this point, as messages sometimes go missing.

Another new feature of Mountain Lion is the new Messages app. With Messages, iChat is now no more, with the new Messages looking and working just like Messages on the iPad, Messages supports Apple's iMessage service as well as AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo! and Jabber. The idea behind Messages is to let users start and continue their conversations on their IOS device and on their desktop. It sounds good in theory but in practice it's quite haphazard since messages end up appearing on both your Mac and iPhone. Furthermore, the service seems to be а little unreliable at the moment since we encountered instances where messages didn’t get through, or they end up being delivered all in one go at а later time.

Power Nap is а feature that is particularly useful, letting the SSD-equipped new Retina Display

MacBook Pro and new MacBook Air computers both send and receive data even while asleep.

With Power Nap, they can backup to Time Machine, download software updates, as well as sync data with contacts, mail, notes, reminders and more, even if they are sleeping. Unfortunately, this feature is only available with the new Retina Display MacBook Pro and newer MacBook Air.

Notes is now a standalone app, syncing automatically to Notes on your iOS device.

Other notable new features of Mountain Lion include the new Reminders and Notes app as well as а reworked Calendar app. New Reminders and Notes created in iCioud will be automatically synced across devices. The new Calendar app also has а revised interface, with the calendar list now appearing as а sidebar instead of the annoying popover.

With Lion, Apple began bringing new iOS-inspired features to its desktop users. With Mountain Lion, they're now one step further to introducing seamless integration with apps such as Messages, Reminders, Notes, Calendar and so оп. All things considered, Mountain Lion is а decent update with some interesting and useful new features. While one of most affordable OS updates from Apple yet, some of the new features, such as Messages, need further refinement.