On Friday afternoon, I decided to upgrade my MacBook Pro to the new Mountain Lion OS. I had planned to wait, but after reading about one dozen highly positive reviews I became too curious about the new OS to wait.
Buying Mountain Lion was easy. It was $20 at the Mac App Store. The download, however, took over two hours. I'm not sure what the hold-up was. My office network is usually quite fast, thus I assumed Apple's servers were a little overloaded from a rush of Friday afternoon downloads. Once downloaded, though, everything installed smoothly.
Overall, I like Mountain Lion. My MacBook seems to be much faster now that it's installed. I haven't experienced any unusual problems with applications I regularly use. Among these are:
- Word 2011
- Outlook 2011
- OneNote (through a Windows Virtual Machine)
- Omnifocus
- Evernote (Mac desktop client)
- Picasa
- Chrome
- Filemaker 12
- Pages
My copy of Mindjet warned me that it may have trouble with Mountain Lion (and thus to save work frequently), although I have yet to encounter any problems.
I'm very happy with the new Pages interface with iCloud. It's now quite easy to leave a document in the iCloud folder and have it easily accessed by Pages on my iPad. I'm also looking forward to syncing Notes through iCloud. As for the rest of iCloud, I haven't made much use of it. I can see the utility in the keeping the Calendar and Address book on it; however, all of my contacts and calendar items are already synced through an Exchange server. I don't use Mail, but rather Outlook 2011 as a mail client. Because I don't use the built in Apple productivity apps, Mountain Lion's new marquee "Notification" center is pretty useless to me.
Mountain Lion's built in productivity apps look nice, but since I also use a PC and most of my company uses PCs we have found that the Exchange server works best for us. Also, this means that I'm not bound to any proprietary system for syncing phones, tables, and computers as Exchange works with Apple devices and Windows PCs as well as Android and Windows based mobile devices. Generally, most of my files are stored in formats which would work on a Windows platform (the main exception being those in Pages and those on programs from the Omni Group).
The above being said, I still prefer to work in the Mac OS environment and plan to do so as long as it's practical. I've been quite pleased with Mountain Lion on the MacBook. While I haven't used most of the touted bells and whistles (i.e., the 200+ new features) I have found already that it is providing a fundamentally faster and better platform for the applications I use frequently. And, I'm very pleased at the ease with which I can work on Pages documents between my Mac and my iPad.
More to come as I keep working using the MacBook...
