Mountain Lion Tweaks, Niggles and a few adjustments to help

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I now have Mountain Lion successfully installed on 2 systems (I haven't tackled my Hackintosh yet and probably won't for a while)
Things have gone well, theres been the odd head scratch and then realisations of whats going on. Most things are great but there are a few niggles and one I haven't quite figured out yet. Ill start with it.


Airplay took a bit of getting going.
The issue was found in that my Apple TV was not up to date but on older firmware. SO in the end easily fixed. It did require that my Macbook Air had a firmware update as it was the model before the newest one. Only issue I have now and can't quite figure if it's a bug or a feature or what is that as soon as I open the computer it is mirrored on the Apple TV if it's on. I thought I should be able to use both at the same time. Anyway I just turn off the Airplay on the Apple TV menu to fix it. The thing is that you can turn off mirroring on the MAcbook Air but it doesn't work. So conclusion has to be a bug.Now some of you are probably saying hey thats great I can't get it to go at all cause my systemm doesn't have a Sandy Bridge Processor in it. Well the good news , and the bad news, is there is an app to fix that, it just cost a little money.

Get AirPlay Mirroring Even if You Can't Get AirPlay Mirroring
You can only use AirPlay mirroring—one of the cooler new features in Mountain Lion—if you have a Mac made after 2011. That's when Intel's Quick Play feature was added to its Sandy Bridge processors. But don't feel left out! You've actually been able to mirror your computer's display to another screen for a while now, regardless of your Mac's age, using AirParrot ($10). AirParrot costs money, sure, but it gives you the same 1080p mirroring that freshly minted Macs have. It's worth it.





Clean Up the Notifications Gridlock
Notifications are terrific in Mountain Lion. But a lot of us have had that same functionality for a while now, with Growl. The problem? They don't play nice together; Notification and Growl banner alerts both show up in the same place by default. So, you've got a few options: Abandon Growl; move Growl's notifications to a different corner of your screen; don't use notifications and only use apps that have Growl support (Sparrow ($10), Adium, etc.); or use Hiss. You'll like that last option.
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Hiss takes all of your Growl notifications, and converts them into Notifications. The big benefit is that all of your notifications will funnel through the same pipes. The bad news is that Notifications is way less customizable and full-featured than Growl. No click-through, no transparent banners, no multiple-banner alerts if a bunch come in at once. Plus, everything that's funneled from Growl displays as Growl notification, whether it's from Rdio or Sonos or Sparrow and Propane or whatever. Lame. But still an improvement.


A Smarter GateKeeper
GateKeeper is Apple's way of making sure you don't install anything dumb or malicious on your machine. It's just a little, shall we say, overzealous at times. On its medium-strictness setting, it makes it difficult to install well-known apps like Steam. Come on.
As an alternative, try deactivating GateKeeper and installing Little Snitch ($30, or free if you reenable every three hours) instead. It won't stop you from installing apps of unknown origin, but it does monitor every incoming and outgoing connection on your machine, and asks for confirmation before letting it go through.
This sounds like a pain, and it can be at first, but once your regular connections are all approved (forever), you have a much more manageable layer of security than GateKeeper. Or, you could just use the two in tandem.





Fix Your Cowboy Rodeo Leather Skins
Yes, the BDSM/Rodeo makeovers to Calendar and Contacts are still ugly. MacNix is an easy solution. You just download two DMG files, run them, and magically, the skeumorphic leather skin is replaced with fresh, clean aluminium. It was even updated yesterday to look even cleaner in Mountain lion—the only remnant is a slightly brown font at the top of Calendar.


Actually Customize Your Gestures
Apple's never offered many customization options for gestures. You can fix that with BetterTouchTool, an app that lets you map literally any function to any gesture or keystroke. Want to launch Mission Control with a pinch? Done. Show desktop with two finger swipe left? Sure! Just be aware that there's such a thing as too much customization, where if someone else is using your computer they'll just punch you in the face instead of taking an hour to learn how to use two-finger scrolling.

Fix Messages' Crappy Log Search
So Messages is actually a really good desktop chat client. Thing is, it also sort of broke chat logs. They're still there, but the Search bar at the top of your messages window freezes the app for about a minute if you've got a lot of logs to sort through. And it's not very helpful after that, either. You can fix this one of two ways: Use Loghorrea to look through your iChat/Messages logs, or install Adium, which has always had the best archiving of the Mac chat clients.