Wolverton: Apple’s Mountain Lion offers new features at a great price

Mountain Lion, the new version of Apple (AAPL)’s computer operating system, is no breakthrough. But it has enough going for it — and a cheap enough price — to make it a compelling update for Mac fans.

The software follows on the heels of last year’s update, OS X Lion. Apple’s goal with Lion was to take some of the features it introduced on the iPhone and iPad and add them to the Mac. Mountain Lion, the eighth update to Apple’s OS X, picks up where Lion left off.

It adds even more features and applications Apple developed for its handheld devices and more closely ties the Mac to Apple’s cloud-based services.

On the whole, the new features are compelling and work well. I wish Apple had gone farther and added even more features, but given that the upgrade costs just $20, it’s hard to complain.

Perhaps the biggest change in Mountain Lion is its systemwide embrace of iCloud, Apple’s suite of Internet-based services. After installing the new software, users are asked to sign into their iCloud account, which typically is the same one they use for iTunes. As with Lion, users can sync their address book contacts and calendar appointments to Apple’s servers. But in Mountain Lion, Apple has added several new cloud-based apps and services.

The new Notes and Reminders applications sync with the corresponding apps on iPhones and iPads so that you always have access to your same list of memos and tasks. Similarly, the new Messages program consolidates the text messages you send from Apple devices. And the Game Center application serves as a central place from which users can view what they’ve accomplished on various games, whether those were played on their iPhones, iPads or now, their Macs.

Mountain Lion also taps into iCloud to incorporate a virtual hard drive, where documents are stored on Apple’s servers. Unlike Dropbox, Google (GOOG) Drive or other rival cloud storage services, you don’t access your documents on iCloud by clicking on a cloud-synced folder. Instead, you see thumbnails of your documents from within the relevant application.

So, when you open Pages, you see all of your Pages-created documents that are stored in the cloud — but not your spreadsheets or slideshow presentations. And when you create a document in Pages or other iCloud-linked programs, the application automatically saves the program to your account in the cloud; you don’t have to tell it where the file should be saved. You still have the option of saving files to your hard drive, but Apple is betting that you won’t want to. By default everything gets synced to iCloud.

This system is generally easier to use than its rivals. But it has some serious shortcomings. Unlike other cloud-based services, iCloud generally doesn’t support Windows computers or Android phones. And unlike services such as Google Drive, iCloud doesn’t support collaboration. You and your colleagues can’t work on a document at the same time. Nor can your friends or family members edit your document unless they’re using your iCloud login.

Another big change with Mountain Lion is its embrace of social networking. Last year, Apple gave iPhone and iPad users the ability to automatically sign into Twitter when they turned on their device and to send messages to the social networking site from a variety of applications. Now Macs are getting a similar feature, only they can also sign into Vimeo, Flickr and, eventually, Facebook.

The social networking feature, dubbed Sharing, allows users to post photos, videos and Web links to those sites without having to visit them in a Web browser. So users can send pictures to Flickr directly from iPhoto or send movies to Vimeo directly from iMovie. The Sharing feature also allows users to post updates to Twitter and — soon — Facebook from the new Notifications area. And it will sync users’ contacts with their list of Facebook friends.

I’m happy to see OS X become more social, and I loved being able to tweet a Web link from the Share button. But I was disappointed that Apple is limiting the number of services that have these deep links within OS X, rather than allowing users to choose whichever ones they use. Thanks to those limitations, you can’t use the Share button in iMovie to send videos to YouTube or the one in iPhoto to send pictures to Picasa or Pinterest.

Apple says Mountain Lion has some 200 new features, which are too many for me to list or rate here. But I will mention two others.

One of the coolest is AirPlay. If you have an Apple TV digital set-top box, AirPlay allows you to beam the images on your computer screen to your television. So instead of having friends or family members crowd around your laptop to see a Web video or a page, they can view them on your big screen.

The feature is one of the easiest ways I’ve seen of getting Web-based videos on to a TV and it addresses a key shortcoming of Apple TV — its lack of content choices. My family and I used the feature to watch videos of the Olympic judo competition in our living room. The video wasn’t perfect — it was a bit jittery to my eyes, though not to my wife’s — but it worked well enough, and we all enjoyed not having to decamp to the computer room.

Another compelling feature is the new Notification Center. This works much like the similar service on the iPhone and iPad. It compiles your recent system alerts and application messages in a bar hidden on the right side of the screen. You can view the messages by swiping on a trackpad or clicking on an icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The feature is a great way to organize such messages and to make them accessible.

Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-840-4285 or twolverton@mercurynews.com. Follow him at www.mercurynews.com/troy-wolverton or Twitter.com/troywolv.