OSX Mountain Lion was released for Mac users earlier today. Which improvement are you most looking forward to?
The price
At only $21 AUD it's even more affordable than the last operating system upgrade.
iCloud
For those of you with an iOS phone or tablet, you can sync documents with your Macbook computer easier than ever before. Of course we've had Dropbox, Google Docs and Evernote, and several other similar implementations in the past that all work fine. But this is Apple's solution, so it's bound to be more tightly integrated into the operating system — for better or for worse.
Messages
The messaging system is shared between your iOS devices and your Macbook, and you can continue a conversation on from one device after starting it on another.
Again, this functionality has been around in various forms for a while. Microsoft's Live Messenger includes the ability to resume your conversation on another device as well. But this is Apple's implementation, on Apple's hardware. So it's bound to be better in some ways for that reason.
Notification Center
If you've been using Growl for notifications on your Macbook, prepare to get Apple's version of this in your next operating system update.
The Notification Center bar takes up just under a quarter of your screen real-estate on the right side when it is activated, and displays reminders and alerts from a number of applications: Mail, Messages, Calendar, Game Center, App Store, FaceTime and more.
Social Integration
As of OSX Mountain Lion, Twitter and Facebook are now further integrated into the operating system. You can also post directly to Flickr and Vimeo, if you use those services.
Social networking is making a big impact on OS releases this year. Windows 8, due to be released in October, has a Sharing API dedicated to this purpose.
One social network that seems to be painfully absent from Apple's implementation, however, is Google+. Considering that they are rival companies in more ways than one, it's not surprising.
Other features
Apple claims that there are more than 200 new features. To me this seems like a marketing stunt — most of those are probably minor improvements, with only a few major changes (e.g. those listed above).
But with as many as 200 new features, you are probably looking forward to some of these minor tweaks as well.
Which new feature do you want the most, and why?
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