Apple’s not going to slow down innovation just to make me happy. I get that. But what have I noticed most about the differences between Mountain Lion and Mountain Lion Server and their predecessors, and maybe what to do to get some of them back?
- Podcast Producer: I am going to just put it out there. I liked Podcast Producer. I hope it shows back up in the future, even though I’m controlling my expectations. As someone who deals with a lot of video, there are a number of features that were really helpful to me, with or without Xgrid. I’ve replaced the command line aspects with tools such as ffmpeg, which we used in addition to at times, but some of the ways that pcastaction did things were really elegant comparably. On the graphical side, much of the functionality is available in the various sites that produce video streams and of course, there’s always YouTube. Either way, in regards to Mountain Lion Server, this represents one of the most substantial changes for those of us that deal with video.
- DHCP: I know, I know… I wrote an article on how to keep using DHCP. That doesn’t mean that the lack of GUI options is any less irritating. Every time I manually edit a config file that should have a GUI front-end it makes me ornery. Not that I’m not always ornery, but that’s not the point here…
- RSS: This is more of a client thing. But Mail.app and Safari used to give me the ability to quickly and easily look at RSS feeds and handled them in a way that was very streamlined with my experience across the rest of the operating system. I am now using more and more Google Reader along with tools like Reeder, but I liked the fact that everything I needed for RSS madness was installed on even the test systems I used
- X11: I know, I know… Use XQuartz. It was nice having it built in though…
- Web Sharing: I guess the answer here is to just buy OS X Server. You can still fire up the LaunchDaemon and use Apache, but it’s a bit of a challenge. And the version in Server isn’t identical to Apache in Mountain Lion. There are two ways I’ve handled this. The first is to install Mountain Lion Server and then use the command `webpromotion demote` to switch the Apache configuration back to that of a client computer. The second is to fire up the LaunchDaemon directly using launchctl. If you’d like, there are also a number of free and/or 3rd party web servers, such as MAMP.
- Negative Mode: Well, I covered this already, and while the keystroke was gone, the feature never was – but here’s how to fix. Also, @sacrilicious turned me on to nocturne, which is pretty cool as well!
- iCal, Address Book and NetBoot: Actually, they’re now called Calendar, Contacts and NetInstall respectively. But still there. I actually like the renaming a lot, so I guess I don’t really miss any of them.
- Radius: OK, it’s there. Just command line only (unless you’re using an Apple AirPort). Maybe I should write an article about radius…
- The Server command line options: Actually, they just moved to a relative path to /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot, as I mentioned here.
- Server Admin: I was going to say FTP, then I remembered it’s back. And then I remembered I never missed it in the first place. But dropping the remainder of the GUI tools for servers represents a bit of a challenge, mostly in figuring out how to do a few of the minor things, like enabling Server Side File Tracking, etc.
