Today, Apple officially launched OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. I’ve been using the final build for a few weeks now and it is in my opinion a solid upgrade. As the name implies, it is more of an incremental upgrade from Lion. While Lion had quite a few visual differences, Mountain Lion is more about improved integration with iCloud and the services that also work on an iOS device. Overall the system feels more refined and faster. The upgrade is also only $20, so really there is no reason not to do it.
My favorite feature that comes over from iOS is certainly the Notification Center. Before Mountain Lion, you had to glance at your email icon or listen for the new message sound to know if a new email had been received. Now with the notification center you get a nice little box that shows up in the upper right alerting you to the message, who it is from, and the subject. You can then click on the message if you want to read it or just ignore it and the notification goes away. This works with several other programs and I’m sure more will be added once apps are updated to support it.
That’s only one of the new features. Here’s a video from The Verge which gives a good rundown the most user noticeable of the changes.