OS X Mountain Lion unfortunatenesses

I was home sick today; didn't have enough brain to do much more than watch TV for most of the day.

But I did eventually end up installing OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on my Mac. Fortunately, that didn't take much brain.

Unfortunately, it has some rough edges.

The most bothersome things so far:

  • In Safari, they've removed the ability to set your own default font. I know this sounds like a minor thing, but it makes a huge difference to me; any web page that doesn't set a font looks kind of tawdry and ugly to me if I don't get to set my own default. I've now created my own local stylesheet that sets the default font, but I'm not sure how to use that to set a default monospace font, and I'm pretty unhappy about the removal of this very longstanding feature (that I think is still available in all other major browsers). I've filed a feedback note about it; if this capability is important to you, you may want to do the same. (I realize that these days, most sites do set their own fonts. But I spend a lot of time on pages that don't.)
  • They've moved Notes into their own separate application, outside of Mail. Which I was expecting, and which is fine—but it turns out that only some of my notes got migrated to the new application. A great many of them—I think the ones that were filed in my Inbox, which is where I usually store notes—are now read-only email messages with yellow backgrounds. I can't figure out how to migrate those to the Notes application, nor how to make them editable.
  • Combining the two above items: In the Notes application, you can pick your default font—but only from a list of three fonts. Feh. Why would they not want you to be able to choose any font you want as a default for notes?
  • They've changed something about the way Mail assigns return addresses, with the result that some SH autoresponses went out today with my name and address on them instead of the standard SH return address. I've now fixed this, but it was a bit of a surprise.
  • I had some trouble with Time Machine at first. Eventually convinced it to keep using the same backup set I've been using, but it took some convincing. (On a side note, although apparently this has been around for a while but I hadn't seen it before, having only upgraded to Lion recently: It turns out you can now do backups to your local disk, and in Time Machine those backups are shown in white, while backups on your TM disk are shown in pink. (Also referred to on various pages as magenta or purple.))

I think there was other stuff too, but I'm still a little muzzyheaded and I'm not remembering what other issues I've run into.

There are certainly things I like (most especially AirPlay Mirroring, which was the main reason I wanted to upgrade), and plenty of things that I imagine I will like when I get used to them, but so far my overall impression is neutral to negative.

3 Responses to “OS X Mountain Lion unfortunatenesses”

  1. frogworth

    The Notes thing: My Notes are synced with Gmail, and they go into a Notes folder. So… have you checked on your IMAP folder for a Notes folder, and if it’s there, can you move all the Inbox Notes into that folder and see if they turn up in the Notes app?

    I had trouble with Time Machine due to migrating to a Retina MBP before upgrading, but on upgrading I found it was fine.
    Don’t use Safari or Mail.app, so I can’t comment on those though. Looking forward to more apps using the Notifications Centre thingy, but only if they’re relatively configurable (last thing I want is a million “User has logged on” notifications jamming it up…)

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  2. frogworth

    (I meant “have you checked on your IMAP server for a Notes folder?”)

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  3. Jed

    Oops, didn’t see this ’til now, sorry. Thanks for the note!

    The mail account in question is a POP account, which I suspect is part of the problem. But maybe if I can get it switched to IMAP at some point (as I’ve been meaning to do for ages), I’ll give your suggestion a try. I never did really understand the idea of Notes belonging to particular mail accounts, but now that you say that, it sounds plausible.

    …Huh, I wonder what happens if I move some of the unmigrated Notes to an account that *is* IMAP. Might be worth a try.

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