Mountain Lion is Apple’s newest operating system, and it has been out for a few months now. This has given us plenty of time to play around with the fun features 10.8 has brought us. I always like stumbling upon features that weren’t big enough to make the announcements, but make you say “Hey, thats pretty neat!”
One of those features in Mountain Lion is the ability to share a file directly from within Finder. To do this, simply select the file you want to share and then click the Share icon (it looks like a curved arrow going to the right out of a box). A drop down menu will list your available means of sharing, including email, iMessage, Twitter, and Facebook, to name a few. I have found that this feature has saved me a lot of time — especially when a co-worker asks me for a file I’ve been working on, because all I do is search for it in Spotlight, then Command-Click the file. It then opens in Finder, and I can use the Share button to email it to them. It’s a simple three-step process.
Apple also gave Address Book a tuneup. It is now called Contacts; sound familiar? That’s because your iOS device calls it that. (Ed. Note: Calendar — formerly iCal — has also gotten the iOS rebranding treatment. See above! -KH) There have been a handful of minor additions to Contacts, but one has stood out for me. If you click on any heading within a contact, a menu pops up with some additional options.
If you need to get directions to someone’s place in your Contacts app that you’ve never been before, simply click on the header and a pop up menu appears giving you the option to “Map this Address.” That will take you straight to Google Maps at the address you have for that contact. You can also create a pre-formatted mailing label that gets copied to the clipboard, or you can copy the URL to send the location to someone else via iMessage or email.
Of course, these are just two minor additions to the new operating system. They are features that I find make my life easier and allow me to do things faster than before. If you would like to see a full run down on the major upgrades to Apple’s OS, you can check them out here on Apple’s website.
For anyone who doesn’t have Mountain Lion yet, it is a download-only upgrade for your Mac. Get your virtual hands on it by going to the App store and searching for Mountain Lion or simply click here.