Devin Coldewey Gets His Hate On For Mountain Lion

This piece by Devin Coldewey needed a break down to, if nothing else, show technical errors and misunderstandings. Devin, do your homework before spewing half-truths.

There’s a good reason Apple let Mountain Lion out of its cage this morning with no fanfare or event.

Yes, it was hot on the heels of an Education Event, and immediately preceding an iPad Event. They want it out this summer and they want developers to have time to take advantage of it.

Like Lion, the improvements are minor at best and some less than useless.

Not only 'useless' but less that useless? Surely this statement will be backed up with a well-reasoned and technically sound article.

Lion hasn’t sold particularly well, and few of its “improvements” have caught the attention of the public, except when they try to scroll down and it goes up. Personally, I thought being able to resize windows from any edge was worth the price of admission alone, but the rest, not so much.

With two months of release Lion had 14% of the Mac market running it, bearing in mind that PowerPC users are still not able to get Lion, and Intel Leopard users face the Snow Leopard roadblock to upgrading. Also, if natural scrolling (which took me and my wife about 3-4 days to get used to) is so bad turn it off!

[UPDATE: MG Seigler, someone who does his homework before writing an article:

Apple says that over 19 million copies of Lion have now shipped (including both Mac App Store and new Mac numbers). This means the software makes up about 30 percent of the total OS X user base in under seven months. They say that it took Windows 7 twenty-one months to reach that milestone.

That's 2.7 million copies per month. On average. What a failure.

And now here is Mountain Lion, a collection of iOS apps and features already available elsewhere. And a shady “security” feature that by default prevents you from getting apps from any source but the Mac App Store.

Wrong. The default allows Mac App Store apps as well as any app with a free, and unrestricted Apple Developer Lisence. But, well, you tried, didn't you? [Update: The licence is free, but the Apple Developer account costs $99, just to be clear.]

Apple-flavored versions of Growl

That's what you think Notification Center is? Wrong again.

and SimpleNote, great.

Except that SimpleNote requires it's own account and servers and another sync mechanism. Notes makes it simpler and is tied-in at the OS level - which makes it more powerful (especially on iOS).

A desktop version of Game Center, a network built around mobile gaming. Why?

It's built around mobile gaming because that's the only platform it's on… are you kidding right now?

And you can now tweet things from anywhere, super easily. Except 95% of your tweets are done either in a client, on your mobile, or within a browser, where there is already a wealth of plugins and bookmarklets.

So instead of downloading and installing a plugin or bookmarklet you can use the baked-in version. This will allow developers to have Twitter integration at the OS level, which cuts down on programming and let's them focus on the features that make their app great. Sounds like a win to me.

A chat client.

That automatically works with Messages on iOS. I've gotta say, it's awesome. I've been trying to find a text-from-my-Mac solution via Bluetooth or WiFi for ages. This does away with that. Awesome.

A screen-casting thing that requires an Apple TV, and can prohibit some content from being transmitted. The share button might be nice.

Obviously you've never used AirPlay Mirroring, or Apple TV. They are both awesome. And those content restrictions exist on the iPad and iPhone as well. Also, I'm not sure yet if Flash Player (Hulu, etc) will know it's being Mirrored and try to stop you. Someone with OS X 10.8 should check on that.

And Gatekeeper – kind of a heavy name for a single setting.

You're attacking the naming of this thing?

It’s not a serious security feature, just a way to shunt people into the Mac App Store by default.

I won't bring it up again because you obviously just heard about this on the radio or something and didn't actually read anything about it at all, but that is NOT TRUE.

It wasn’t long ago that Facebook and Google were facing withering criticism for similar “defaulting” strategies. The shoe is on the other foot today, though as usual it’s really more a philosophical problem than a practical one. Just change the setting.

Links? Hard to back up baseless assertions, eh?

I’m not trying to be overly negative, here.

Another failure.

I like my Mac. But neither Lion nor Mountain Lion (also known as the Puma or Panther) has made me excited about using it.

Well, keep using Snow Leopard, then. It's a fine OS.

On the contrary, I’m worried about it. The features added have been increasingly imitative, restrictive, and questionable from a user-experience point of view. I know there are big changes coming down the line, and I look forward to them, but these holdover releases are toothless.

But getting rid of the need for a lot of plugins, add-ons, and new programs Mountain Lion (and Lion before it) bring these features to more people. I love Growl, but Notification Center is so much better and more capable than Growl. Google Voice? Move to Canada and try using Google Voice. You obviously don't know what you're talking about and it shows.