OS X Mountain Lion: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Documents, Programs & Mission Control

The whole point of owning a computer, of course, is to run programs—or, as Apple likes to call them, apps. And in Mountain Lion, Apple wants programs to look and work like they do on the iPad: simply. As full-screen, autosaving worlds. You’re supposed to open them from a simple Home screen arrayed with app icons, and you’re supposed to switch among them by swiping with your fingers on your trackpad or mouse.

This radical new vision of running programs is actually possible in Mountain Lion—sort of. The hitch is that a lot of the iPaddy features, including full-screen mode and autosaving, don’t work in pre-Lion programs. Software companies have to update their apps to add these features.

Most of them will do that, but in the meantime, you’ll go through a weird period of mixed metaphors, where some programs can do those tricks and others can’t.

In any case, this chapter covers Apple’s New Way of Running Programs, and all of its Capitalized Elements: the Mac App Store, Launchpad, Mission Control, Full Screen, Auto Save, Versions, and more.

The Mac App Store

For years, people installed software onto their computers by buying disks: floppies, CDs, and, later, DVDs.

But starting with the iPhone, people installed software onto their phones by downloading it directly from the Internet. Once everybody saw how convenient (and profitable) that system was, it didn’t take Apple long to realize it could bring the same convenience to the Mac.

So now there’s ...