Well I must admit as a self-confessed apple fan that I was looking forward to the new Mountain Lion operating system. It was released on the 25th and I did wait for about one day before I downloaded my copy. For those of you that have still not taken the leap the operating system does almost look like the previous version OS X lion Lion. Although there are a few changes present in the OS that are apparent on first look. Some of the more noticeable changes are the appeareance of the notes application and the reminders application in the new operating system.
In fact I’m writing this blog on the new notes application, this application is something that the people have been using iOS are familiar with. The reminders application also seems to have been lifted out of iOS and object of the new operating system seems to be to bring mobile and desktop OS’s closer to each other. Another noticeable iOS feature that is noticeable is the notification centre which is a bit difficult to find, it rests in the extreme upper right hand corner of the screen. When you hit the icon of the notification centre which looks like a horizontally inclined bar graph you will find that the screen’s opens up just a bit and the notifications are revealed.
There are some other changes as well in the new operating system which are noticeable especially the new Safari web browser which has search inside of the address bar. Previously this was a feature that was mostly available in Google’s chrome browser and for those of us will have been using chrome for a while shifting to Safari was often frustrating because people would often type in search terms inside the address bar instead of putting it in the separate search bar that was previously present in the Safari browser. Safari also seems to have integrated iCloud and now it is possible for users of the browser across various Apple devices to be able to see what they had been doing on other devices and across devices that they own. It is also possible now to directly share with your friends links and such from the browser without having to copy and paste links to social networking sites like Twitter, it is speculated that Facebook would be arriving in autumn.
As for me the best feature in the new operating system is ‘dictation’ which is how this post was written. It is for the first time that I have been able to write a considerable amount of text using dictation. I own an iPad but I have somehow never been able to make myself understood properly to that device. I’m guessing that is because the settings on the iPad are set to English US and the computer that I’m using has been set to English UK and with my Indian accent perhaps it may be easier if I were to change the iPad as well to English UK. With dictation getting better all the time, the day is not far when we authors would be able to get by with a lot less typing than we do now. All in all with 200 new features and $20 for upgrade it is quite a reasonable upgrade and recommended if you have a newer computer which would definitely benefit from it.
