Nearly 10 Things About Mountain Lion … roarrr 

Lame title aside, I've not had much time to write in the past few weeks. So, while I've got a few minutes of downtime, I figured I'd brain dump a few of the things I've learned about Mountain Lion, as I've been using it since it came out last week.

  1. I regained about 15GB of disk space after installing Mountain Lion. I'm not sure this will happen to everyone, but I'm guessing between clearing out old caches, probably clearing out some of the 32 bit components (since it's a full 64 bit os), and just going through a full reboot, I got back a whole boat load of disk space.
  2. Notification Center is cool, but reasonably useless. Until more apps support it (which means updating and releasing in the Mac App Store, it tends to be a no man's land for me. I use Growl a ton, and in a few weeks (hopefully), Growl 2.0 will be out, which will pipe all of those fun Growl notifications right into the Notification Center. That will be nifty.
  3. Brett Terpstra hooked up a nice script that lets you pipe stuff into the Notification Center. If you do anything in the Terminal, or script anything at all, it's pretty awesome.
  4. iTunes continues its slide towards suckitude. For whatever reason, iTunes performance seems to be worse. The podcast interface, intermittently, throws crazy beachballs when just clicking on a podcast. Could just be me, but I'm guessing it's something in the newest build.
  5. Safari is good again. Safari gets really good for a build, then falls behind Chrome for a while, then gets really good again. iCloud tabs are great, the speed is great, as is finally merging the search and URL bar. A few months from now, I'm guessing it'll have drifted behind Chrome again.
  6. iCloud is getting better. Slowly but surely, iCloud is getting really useful. The aforementioned iCloud tabs are great, and for some apps, iCloud for documents is really good. There are a few things missing (can't share docs between apps; not enough apps using iCloud), some bugs (Contacts still seems to flake out sometimes), and some performance issues. But by and large, iCloud is useful. It's just not as useful as Dropbox, yet (for files).
  7. Twitter integration is sort of cool. It's nice to be able to quickly tweet from Notification Center, or to sync up a contact's Twitter user with their address book entry.
  8. AirPlay Mirroring is badass. Too bad it only works with newer Macs. I'm sure someone will hack it to work with others.
  9. It's $20 bucks. Just buy it.

I haven't really played with dictation, but I'm guessing that'll turn out to be pretty cool. For instance, I just dictated this line right here. Works well enough, though the lack of response while you're speaking is disconcerting (because it is sending everything out to Apple's servers, rather than doing it locally. so it can't keep up with your speaking).

Anyway, seriously, it's $20. Go buy it.

And yeah, I probably should have just come up with a tenth fact.