Perhaps you’ve upgraded your Mac to Mountain Lion, but have you turned on all the best features? Make sure you’re not missing out on all the ways OS X 10.8 can interact with iOS devices, from iPads to the new iPhone 5.
Apple users, who may be thinking this week about getting ready for a new iPhone and mobile operating system, will do well to make sure their Macs are up to date. Assuming you’ve already installed Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion ($19.99, 4.5 stars), there are a few features and options you’ll want to make sure you’ve enabled to fully take advantage of the operating system. You’ll get more out of your Mac when it’s set up to interact with your iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices.
Turn On iCloud
To take advantage of how Mountain Lion syncs and interacts with your iPhone, iPad, or other Apple devices, you have to turn on iCloud.
iCloud has many uses, including backup, but for the purpose of this article, let’s look at using it for syncing. Part of what makes OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion special is that you can start something on your mobile device and finish it on your Mac, practically seamlessly. Previous versions of OS X do support iCloud, too, but with Mountain Lion, you’ll see even more features that leverage iCloud in some neat ways.
You’ll find iCloud on your Mac in Settings, the same place you can find it on your iPhone and iPad. The first step is to simply log in with your Apple ID. Make sure you turn on iCloud on all the devices where you want to use it.
Turn on the various apps that you want to sync. If you use the Contacts apps on your iPhone or iPad, I definitely recommend turning it on in Mountain Lion, as some of the other apps and services will leverage your Contacts list. I also recommend most users sync Safari bookmarks, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes, too. Plenty more apps and services sync, of course, so turn on the ones you prefer. And with iOS 6 (coming later in September), photos can be shared with your contacts automatically, if you’ve set up iCloud’s Photo Stream.
(Note: If you have Apple mobile devices but use a Windows computer, you can still use a lot of iCloud’s services and features, but not all of them. For some features, Apple gives you a Windows alternative; for example, you can sync bookmarks between Internet Explorer and iOS devices.)
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Set Up iMessage
iMessage is by far one of my favorite features in Mountain Lion, and it replaces the old iChat. iMessage is Apple’s messaging service that optimizes texting by bypassing SMS when it can. On an iPhone or an iPad, it’s part of the Messages app. What iMessage does is improve messaging between Apple devices. When you send messages between iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads running iOS 5 or later, iMessage prioritizes sending and receiving the messages via Wi-Fi when it’s available and through 3G when it’s not.
When you’re on your laptop or Mac computer running Mountain Lion, you can pick up your text conversations right where you left them—except for messages from non-Apple users that came in as SMS texts on your phone, unfortunately. You can also see new messages come in on your computer, which is better for productivity than moving away from the keyboard and screen to view incoming messages on a phone or tablet. Another reason I love iMessage is it supports AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber, letting you merge Messages with systems you’re already using. Also would be nice if it tied in with FaceTime, since the old iChat did video.]
To set up iMessage, go to the app and log in with your Apple ID.
To get the most out of iMessage, you’ll want to use Contacts (Apple’s address book) to store phone numbers, handles, and email addresses of the people with whom you will likely swap messages, iMessage integrates cleanly with that data. Type a few letters of a person’s name, and within a few clicks, you can be text-chatting. However, you don’t have to use your Contacts list. You can also type a phone number of an iPhone into the “to” field and start a message. That’s something you couldn’t do with iChat, and it’s central to the whole concept of renaming the app Messages.
Turn On FaceTime
FaceTime is Apple’s video chat app. Once you have iCloud handling all your contacts, FaceTime becomes much more usable, so be sure to turn on iCloud and sync your contacts first to be sure you have everyone’s email addresses on hand.
Setting up FaceTime is a snap. When you launch the app, it will prompt you to log in with your Apple ID (or another email address if you prefer). From there, it’s just a matter of figuring out who else among your friends, family, and business associates uses the program. You can choose their names from the contact list that shows up in the app. It doesn’t matter if your friends are using FaceTime to make or receive video calls from their Macs, iPads, iPhones, or iPod touches, and when iOS 6 rolls out (September 19), mobile users will be able to access FaceTime over their cellular networks as well—not just over Wi-Fi as was previously the case.
Across Apple products, we’ve seen Twitter become more tightly integrated with the operating system itself rather than just apps. Mountain Lion is no exception. The idea is that you should be able to share various goodies, such as URLs and photos, to Twitter in just a click or two.
To set up Twitter, you can either turn it on in the Settings, or just log into Twitter from your machine, and Mountain Lion will suggest enabling it automatically.
Coming soon, according to Apple, we’ll see the same kind of integration with Facebook. Apple’s iPhoto software already integrates pretty neatly with Facebook, letting you not only share photos to the social networking in a snap, while also letting you keep an eye on the activity that happens around those images after you share them. iOS 6 will also tie Facebook into its basic sharing services, so do expect to see more information about this feature in the near future.
Customize Alerts
Once you have iMessage turned on, you’ll want to make sure the app notifies you of incoming messages in the manner you want. To customize alerts from iMessage, as well as from other apps, you’ll need to hit up the Notifications section of the Settings.
You can turn on or off alerts for a number of different apps and services, as well as change where they appear on the screen and what (if any) sound they include. The “alerts” option (shown in the image above) will put you notifications in a collapsible right pane on the screen.
In my testing, I’ve found that the most useful alerts come from iMessage and Calendar, but you can also turn them on for incoming Mail, Twitter activity, Reminders app reminders, Game Center activity, Facetime calls, and more.
Get Ready for iOS 6
The single biggest change from OS X 10.7 Lion to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was just how much tighter the desktop operating system became with the mobile operating system. And with iOS 6, Apple users will see a few more improvements in terms of how their mobile devices work in collaboration with OS X—just one more reason to make sure you customize Mountain Lion to take advantage of all that the system offers.