We showed you how to switch on Power Nap on your Mountain Lion-running, SSD-equipped Mac, but just what does this new feature do?
We know that you Mac enters a kind of robotic REM sleep, where it’s brain activity spikes and the network connections power up to download various bits of data, just like Newsstand on iOS. But a new Apple Knowledge Base article outlines the surprising number of tasks which are going on under the sleepy-lidded hood.
As you probably know already, Mountain Lion was released this morning, and we at Cult of Mac have been digging through the beta versions for months. There are some subtle and hidden things in Mountain Lion you may not notice, like the fact that Apple has actually included a stealthy “do not disturb” setting for Notification Center. You can mute all notifications from bugging you for a day at a time by flipping a switch that sneakily sits at the very top of the Notification Center window.
Mountain Lion includes over 200 new features. Some of them are dramatic and hard to miss while others are minor conveniences that don’t stand out immediately. Many of those big and small new features and improvements have a lot of appeal for business users.
Here’s a list of the many new features in Mountain Lion that can help professionals in almost any industry work smarter, more efficiently, and more effectively.
The year is 2012, and the March of the Big Cats continues. Apple is about to release Mountain Lion, the latest iteration of (Mac) OS X, and citizens of the Appleverse are eager to explore what this new feline has to offer. How far we’ve come in just over a decade.
Back in 2001 Apple introduced their new, long awaited replacement to the Classic Macintosh System Software: Mac OS X. As Mountain Lion goes on the prowl, Cult of Mac reviews the Evolution of OS X and once again presents our look back at Apple’s Big Cats over the years – from Cheetah and Puma through to Apple’s current Felidae offerings.
The Podcasts app, released by Apple last month, is a thing of potential beauty. I’ve already returned to a state of podcast listening due to the app, which lets me find and focus solely on the podcast content I need, without all the kludgy hassle of syncing and downloading.
Notice I said “potential” beauty. The app is really not ready for prime time, with freezes, crashes and a dearth of sync between, for example, an iPhone and an iPad. That’s set to change later today, according to “sources” mentioned at AllThingsD, with an update to the Podcasts app that should fix these issues, at least.
GarageBand is awesome, we know. But when it comes time to get a little more professional, professionals (and their pro-sumer brethren) choose Logic Pro, now owned by Apple.
If you’ve been using GarageBand on your iPad, of course, you might wonder how to get these files into Logic Pro, so you can add all the professional polish that such a Digital Audio Workstation provides, using the files you perhaps created on the road with your iPad. Or even the ones you created downstairs on your iPad – it’s cool. Because Logic Pro is not available on the iPad, but GarageBand is.
With the release of OS X Mountain Lion today, Apple also released Safari 6.0 for Mac. As noted by some, the Windows version of Safari didn’t see the update, and in fact, disappeared from Apple’s site altogether.
While a direct download is still available, speculation has arisen that perhaps Safari for Windows had been completely discontinued.
Time Machine, Apple’s amazingly simple backup solution, debuted in Mac OS X 10 Leopard and changed the way a lot of us kept our Macs backed up. No longer were we tied to complex software like Retrospect, or easily forgotten manual backup systems. Time Machine made backing up our Macs easy and automatic. Even more importantly, it just worked.
Flash forward to today’s release of Mountain Lion, and Apple has quietly added a feature many of us have been wishing for, whether we knew it or not – multi-disk backups. One of the best practices in data backup plans is to create more than one backup, and then take one of them off site (if at a business, say) for safekeeping. At home, having more than one cheap, capacious hard drive to backup to is added peace of mind, considering how often those cheap, capacious drives can fail.
Apple only sells OS X Mountain Lion as a digital download in the Mac App Store. The installer weighs in at a hefty 4.05GB, but the good news is that you can install your copy of Mountain Lion on all of your Macs for no extra charge. Technically, the Mountain Lion installer can be used on an infinite number of Macs once you have it; you just need to make a bootable disk or drive.
See, the Mountain Lion installer is set to self-destruct once it’s used. When your Mac reboots running Mountain Lion, the installer will be gone and you’ll have to re-download it if you want to use it again. Another reason to create a bootable copy of Mountain Lion is if you want to do a clean install. Apple’s installer will keep your files and personal setup intact while installing Mountain Lion, but a bootable disk will allow you to erase your Mac and start completely anew.
The good news is that creating a bootable disk or USB drive of Mountain Lion is pretty simple.
SpellTower, the award-winning word game for iOS, is part of the first wave Mountain Lion-ready games in the Mac App Store today, with Retina graphics and support for Game Center leaderboards and achievements shared with iOS, a Mountain Lion only feature.
SpellTower is a word finding game – click your way through letters set up in a grid, creating words from adjacent letters. The visuals, the sound, and the simple pleasure of finding longer and better words all shine through, making it a joy to play. But how does a game designed for the touchscreen of your iPhone or iPad work on the Mac?