Mountain Lion – Adding Value

Lighter, faster, iOSified –  with lots of polish.
Behold OS X Mountain

With my iMac being a 2008 edition, Mac OS X has had 4 OS upgrades over the last 4 years, going from Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and culminating in this weeks release of Mountain Lion.  Windows in this period of time has had Vista and Windows 7, not withstanding service packs.

In terms of day to day experience, Snow Leopard was certainly the memorable release in terms of speed and ease of use between Leopard and Lion. 2011's Lion, I was always troubled with. Slow to start up and generally less than satisfying as an user experience.  I started to think that future demands of the iMac would no longer be up to the task of future OS X releases, due to the sluggish nature of Lion.  Essentially I've been planning an iMac replacement, sporting an SSD in the next 12 months.   

I also wondered if this was justified, since one should be able to get very good mileage from iMacs. Notwithstanding the SSD, which I believe is essential as time moves on, upgrading to Mountain Lion has revealed that Lion's engineering performance was likely to be the source of the problem as much as hardware specs and expectations on my part. With no metrics or benchmark to hand,  Mountain Lion contains a speed bump which is markedly positive and reverts the iMac performance back to the Snow Leopard days. In addition there are 2 other things which are stand-out of this release for me

Safari – this was surprise. It now has the Chrome-like omnibar and it's damn fast. I mean faster than Chrome. Yes, I said that.  It's also more likely to be more stable and less memory leaky or be the cause of white screen crashes. And that's with Flash still enabled. With Xmarks to keep by bookmarks in tow, Chrome has just been overthrown.  I didn't see that one coming.

Airplay Mirroring – restricted to my 2011 Macbook Air, I can finally stream FoxSocerTV and Hulu to the big screen (I've given up on it ever coming to Boxee).  And I've been pleasantly surprised, the scaling on Airplay mirroring to my Sony flat screen looks nice and is perfectly watchable.  Not HD, but decent quality watchable.  Of course, AirParrot has been around for a number of months and replicates the Airplay mirroring feature for pre 2011 Macs of all sizes.  Using AirParrot, my iMac does take quite a performance hit on the CPU, due to the lack of support in the then ATI graphics chip GPU for encoding and scaling which is of course is now built into the Sandy and Ivy Bridge processors of latest Mac lines. 

Beyond that, I'm ignoring all the other useful features such as Notification Centre, iCloud support, Gatekeeper security and integrated sharing with Twitter for  most OSX updated apps added to all the other iOSification touches. But you can read that across the dozens of other great mainstream reviews like this one at Ars.  

All this for £13 ($20). Now that is what I call added value.

When upgrades seem like downgrades

I've been a big fan of of the Silvio Rizzi's Reeder for iPhone, iPad & Mac for what feels like ages now. It's one of my core and most often used apps for catching up with tech and sports news on a daily basis. I'll admint, I'm an RSS guy and I'm proud. Don't get me wrong, I love curated feed apps such as Flipboard and Zite which add tremendous value to the reading experience.  But when it comes to really scanning all your news items, it's got to be an RSS reader. Reeder's interface and experience reveals a clean, functional and Mac simple-like experience in reading and sharing news feeds. It achieves a uniform experience this across the entire iOS and Mac range which is a rare feat. It's an app I wish existed on Android (although gReader Pro is very good in its own right).

The iPhone version is what I use most while on the move. Up to version 2.x it offered a quick way to read news but to share with Instapaper and most importantly Twitter followers, using my custom URL which is I set up on bit.ly.  Real nice bit of flexibility.

I've had version 3.x running for probably for 2 weeks, and while this post is not there to overly criticize the developer (who does a great job and is clearly thinking of evolving the product), the new version has left me somewhat disgruntled in terms of the overall balance of gains in new functionality versus ones which have been changed or upgraded for that matter. My main grips fall into 2 areas affecting functionality and user experience.

The functionality gripe is simple. The bit.ly support for custom URL sharing in Twitter is gone (at least for now). And the custom Twitter messaging has been replaced by the generic iOS Twitter integration dialogue:

Reeder v3.0 for iPhone - sharing to Twitter.
No visible shortened link
and no way to do it

The other odd grip relates to the design led animation to move from one article to another. It essentially mimicks moving from one piece of paper to another as if they were joined together. It's an interesting touch, but not to my liking. Again, the sort of thing which for some of us, takes away from the overall experience and enables us to moan that v3 feels like a backward step in places. You only need to look at some of the review on the Apps Store to see that I'm not alone.  

Anyway, if you are new to Reeder and have always wondered if its worth the 3 bucks (separately for iOS devices and Mac), there are other posts which provided a more rounded introduction than my moans.  I mean, I still use it daily, so that's saying something about the competition.