14 DAY TRIAL // As Apple launched its new Mountain Lion build for testing last week, few reports mentioned the known issues listed by Apple in the seed notes. In fact, there are no dedicated reports that look at this aspect in particular, and these are important things to note, if we’re to properly assess Apple’s progress.
The company run by Tim Cook says it wants to get Mountain Lion out by the end of summer. However, the huge list of known issues would have us think otherwise.
For example, systems that have FileVault enabled may be unable to present a password dialog at boot time when canceling the restart to the Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3 Installer.
Testers can repair the problem by holding down command-R to boot to the Recovery OS and use Disk Utility to unlock and Repair their volume.
Another drawback, installing any developer preview of Mountain Lion over any version of OS X Lion under 10.7.2 with FileVault turned on may fail.
Pre-Lion FileVault user accounts are not supported in Mountain Lion DP3, and some Apple menu items may not work when a sandboxed app is in the foreground, such as Restart.
In the Recovery HD, some icons may be missing, and Network Utility’s Lookup pane does not work. Time Machine restoration via a AFP share doesn’t work either, nor does restoring from a Time Machine backup via AFP.
The system may actually become unusable if the tester migrates content from a Time Machine backup that excludes paths such as /System.
Brightness settings may change unexpectedly after reboot, and the display brightness may be dim after sleep or reboot, despite no such command from the user.
Mail may not be correctly relaunched during a subsequent login, if the app is hidden at logout time. However, it will appear to be running, even though it is not.
Java applets may or may not work in Safari, and QuickTime screen recordings may produce corrupted videos. Machines with NVIDIA graphic cards may cause an exception, according to the seed notes.
Game Center has a huge list of known issues dedicated all to itself.
Apple first and foremost explains that, “In this seed, the Game Center application will view Production data by default. Games in development will be programmatically switched to use the Sandbox server environment.”
Then, the troubles encountered in earlier developer previews are listed:
- No Top Games are displayed on the Me tab and no game recommendations are shown on the Games tab - To use Game Center in your game on OS X, you must install a provisioning profile that enables Game Center for your app. Code signing, entitlements, and provisioning profiles are all described in detail in Tools Workflow Guide for Mac - Multiplayer gaming with Game Center between iOS and OS X is not available in this seed - In the Game Center app, game detail information such as game provider, pricing, etc. is not displayed - The local peer-to-peer GameKit API (GKSession, GKPeerPickerController, and related classes) is not supported
On a more general level, iTunes no longer syncs Notes, Mail’s photo browser cannot access the iPhoto library, iCloud’s Back to My Mac doesn’t work for the first 5 minutes after rebooting, the DVD Player app may not launch after inserting a DVD on some systems (Apple doesn’t mention which), and most help topics are unavailable at this point.