Mountain Lion First Impressions

The latest cat from Apple is out, and I wanted to share my first impressions from a designer/artist point of view, having played with it for a few hours.

I first installed Mountain Lion on my early 2008 Mac Pro. I’ve tested apps like Photoshop CS6, Sketchbook Pro 2011, and Manga Studio Pro EX and they all seem to work just fine. Even older, stodgy apps that I have to use on a regular basis, like Easy Grade Pro 4.1, work just fine in Mountain Lion.

Window rendering and cursor movement / scrolling appear to be both smoother and faster; the overall fit and finish of Mountain Lion seems to be more refined. In other words, Mountain Lion is what Lion should have been.

Unlike previous OS installs, I upgraded both my Macbook Pro and my Mac Pro right ontop of Lion. My machines are regularly pruned, so I felt that a clean install wasn’t really needed.

I haven’t dabbled with many of Mountain Lion’s new features, but I really do like the new Notification Center, which lets me take a look, at a glance, to incoming information (e-mail, chat messages, etc.) without having to interrupt what I’m currently working on. For the first time in years, I have reverted my Dock back to the 3D look. It’s clean and looks great, though the small LED lights underneath each icon are a bit more difficult to discern from a visual standpoint.

The built-in social sharing throughout Mountain Lion is also a welcome addition. Uploading to Flickr with just a click in the Finder window is just plain impressive.

Lastly, the new screen savers are really attractive – as are the new desktop wallpapers. I have yet to try iCloud sharing my documents, but I plan to in the near future. With Mountain Lion, Apple has consolidated system updates in the App Store application. It makes sense for one-stop updates.

All in all, I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far. OS X has come a long way since its early days. Now if only the same thing could be said for iTunes… (don’t get me started on that one.)

-Krishna

Krishna July 25, 2012 Mac, OS X, productivity