Oh god. Mountain Lion. I have a huge love-hate relationship with Mountain Lion.
Mountain Lion is a pristine example of shitty design. I have no idea what happened to Apple over the last 4 years, but it seems that the HIG is now some sort of joke. Ridiculous skeuomorphs, unusable UX, and design inconsistencies across the board. Look at Address Book (or is it now Contacts), Game Center, Notes, and Notifications. What were they thinking?
They've changed Safari so that tabs span the entire window's width. The dashboard background is disgusting (really, studded rubber? Who the **** thought of that?) And linen everywhere. During file copies and moves, there's a inline progress bar over the file, and an 'x' to cancel the copy, but it's positioned in the
most ridiculous of places. The greyscale sidebar and toolbar icons aren't so bad, but the icon design isn't so good. For such tiny icons, there needs to be more highlights and details, and not just solid block of black. Share buttons
everywhere. Pretty much every new icon since Lion has absolutely no effort put into it. And what's the use of launchpad?
Oh, and as mentioned, the naming and logo. Snow Leopard looked sexy, and sounded sexy. Lion was still alright. It looked and sounded majestic, even. Mountain Lion? It's a step back in naming hierarchy, and it looks so...bleh. I mean,
look at that.
All that said, it has a lot of features from Lion that I'm growing weary of not having, as well as new features that I really want. Full screen, minimal, disappearing scrollbars, Safari unified search bar, iCloud integration (it'll come in handy for stupidly simple, well-integrated backup, but I don't have any other Apple devices
), and dictation. Calendar looks like a pretty big upgrade UI-wise and UX-wise (despite the skeuomorphed leather). Preview seems to be revamped, and iMessages seems to be incredibly useful, seeing as almost everyone has an iPhone or Mac nowadays. Popovers and much quicker Dictionary access. Oh, and Auto Save and Versions are a huge yes.
I would love to remain on Snow Leopard. Pretty much every aspect of it seemed well thought through (except iTunes and the Stacks scrollbar). Everything about it was gorgeous, from the
package design *drools* to the OS itself. The Aurora is one of the best wallpapers of all time. It's the best OS Apple has ever made. But it seems it's time to let go.
