I’ve been using Mountain Lion, the new version of the Macintosh operating system, for less than a day so this isn’t intended to be detailed (see John Siracua’s review) or thorough. I have, however, kicked the proverbial tyres so here are a few, quick thoughts.

Good

• Probably the most stable 10.x.0 release I’ve used
• Little earth shattering but lots of really nice improvements, not all of which I’ve seen documented (for example, attachments in Mail now appear in the “All My Files” view in the Finder, multiple Time Machine disks)
• Notification Center works well; AirPlay mirroring is going to be really useful
• I’ve not found any software that worked in Lion that no longer works. That includes stuff like VMWare (scary because it’s low-level) and Photoshop Elements 6 which is not listed on Roaring Apps compatibility list

Bad

Imagine the scene…

Okay, that’s a bit dramatic.

Recall that I have an iPhone app called Yummy. It has, or rather had, a website called YummyApp.com. Last year I formed a company called Wandle Software and since then have been merging my various web “properties.” The website moved over to wandlesoftware.com earlier this year, email was the last thing that needed transferring.

My email is hosted using Google Apps — Gmail but without the gmail.com email address if you’ve not heard of it. What I wanted to do was move yummyapp.com from being a “proper” domain to what Google refer to as a domain alias for wandlesoftware.com.

This is really starting to bug me. Nearly a week after Facebook’s IPO and the papers are still saying that it was a failure. It wasn’t, or at least, whether or not is was depends on who you are. And I suspect you prefer the winner to the so-called losers.

Let’s start with the basics. What is an IPO? It’s simple: a company sells a part of itself in exchange for cash. In the physical world, that’s the same as me making something and selling it to you. For the sake of this example, let’s say that I sell it to you for £1.

Blocking content from the Internet is getting a lot of press of late. The last couple of weeks has seen the Pirate Bay being blocked by a number of large ISPs and debate over whether the blocking of “adult” content should be opt-in or opt-out.

Unfortunately the enthusiasm to “protect the children” and “protect the copyright holders” seems to have pushed aside much of the debate of whether we should be doing this at all or whether it’s practical.

Instapaper

• The save page bookmark works with Google Reader. That is, it saves the link I’m reading rather than the Google Reader web page.
• Page turn. Rather than display the page as a long, scrollable single page, Instapaper paginates the document. You can “turn” the page much as you do in iBook or the Kindle app.
• Progress indicators. I like that it shows roughly how long a document is and how much has been read.
• Clean, minimal interface.
• The trick of reading the current page to make site like NYTimes (with page view restrictions) or LWN (pay walls) is a great idea but not completely reliable.
• Recent updates have been less stable. Going from day to night mode — an otherwise nice idea — almost always crashes. Putting the app into the background often loses the current location (it returns to the end of an archived article).

Pocket

You’ve probably seen that it’s the Sinclair Spectrum’s thirtieth birthday today. There are lots of great retrospectives — this is probably the best single source I read — so I’m not going to rehash all that. But I thought it might be worth a few words of my own.

Like many Brits my age, the Spectrum was my first computer. Technically it was the family computer, but after a few weeks I was pretty much the only one who used it.

It started with this image. Or rather the glitch that you can see in the middle of the screen.

It’s one of the screens in a new app that I’ve been developing. There’s lots of hard stuff in there but this is the first problem that has really stumped me. What it appeared to be was this: a text view (UITextView) on a table (UITableView) showed a nasty glitch when you tried to place the curser in the text box.

It seems that there’s a large variation in people’s experience with iCloud and iTunes Match, Apple’s recently introduced service for making your entire music collection available across all your devices. At the risk of making things worse — since I have nothing conclusive to add — I thought that I’d add my anecdote to the collection.

Like most software — and especially Apples — it works best when you work in a particular way. It’s often difficult to tell how close your expectations are to the real thing until after you’ve handed over your credit card. But what I will say is that iTunes Match works pretty well if you want to do what I do. So if you read nothing else in this post, you should look at the next few paragraphs.

It’s odd to feel a sense of loss for someone you never knew. The last time I can remember that this happened was when Douglas Adams died ten years ago. There are not many people like them.

What else can I add that has not already been said? Honestly, I’m not even going to try. Instead, here is a selection of links that I think hit the nail right on the head.

I’ve been playing around with Google+ more-or-less since it launched, but I’m not sold on it yet. After a bit of thought, I think it’s because there’s a fundamental disconnect between the kinds of behaviour that it encourages and the kinds of behaviour that it’s actually good at. Or maybe I’m just using it wrong. Either way, I’ll explain my reasoning here.

First, I should describe my frame of reference. I use both Twitter and Facebook, but I like the former much more.