Apple has pushed out another update to OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3, as the anticipated summer public release of OS X 10.8 nears. The new build is 12A206j and can be downloaded through the Mac App Store by any registered Mac developer running 12A193i or later of Mountain Lion.

The latest build includes noticeable changes to Notification Center, Notes, Share Sheets, and several other prominent OS X 10.8 features. 12A206j also features many bug fixes though it continues to have a handful of prominent issues that are yet to be addressed. Additionally, some 2007 MacBook Pro models are currently missing support in the new version, though that is expected to be resolved in a future update.

Automatic termination is a feature of OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion that comes from the realm of iOS, the idea is that after an app is unused for a period of time and becomes inactive, it will automatically terminate to free up resources for other tasks. With the help of the new auto-save feature, the user should theoretically never notice any of this going on and they can continue on with their work as usual when they need to, letting Mac OS X manage processes and resources for them without quitting apps or manual interaction through Activity Monitor.

For the vast majority of users this is a good thing and most are probably completely unaware of the features existence, but not everyone is thrilled with the prospect of dormant applications being quit without their command and some find it really annoying. If you fall into the second category and want to turn off automatic app termination in OS X, here is how to do it. Don’t worry, we’ll also show you how to turn it back on.

Disable Automatic Termination in Mac OS X
Launch Terminal and enter the following defaults write command:

defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool yes

Relaunch apps that use auto-termination for changes to take effect.

Re-Enable Automatic App Termination in Mac OS X
You can always reenable the default behavior of OS X and turn auto termination back on:

defaults delete NSDisableAutomaticTermination

Or by reversing “yes” to “no” and running the original command again:

defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool no

Again, relaunch apps for the changes to take effect and to have auto-terminate enabled again.

This is something that Mac OS X and iOS handles fairly well, and if you’ve never been annoyed by the feature it’s recommended to leave it enabled and let OS X manage tasks itself.

Thanks to qwerty for finding the tip in a StackExchange thread.

Ever since Mac OS X 10.7, the Mac has included the same elastic over-scrolling that exists in the iOS world. Frequently called “rubberband scrolling”, it kicks in as an overscrolling effect that runs out of the scrollable region revealing the linen background before snapping back into the scrollable region. Scroll up quickly with or without inertia in virtually any window since OS X Lion to see the effect in action. Rubberbanding makes for good eye candy and makes the Mac feel familiar to those coming from the iOS world, but some users are annoyed with it and will appreciate the ability to disable the scroll elasticity completely.

Launch Terminal found in the /Applications/Utilities/ directory and enter the following defaults write command exactly:

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0

Apps will need to relaunch for the changes to take effect, though disabling rubber band scrolling does not work in every app.

To undo the change and get rubberband scrolling back, use the following defaults command:

defaults delete -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding

This is a great tip that has long been wished for by many users, heads up to MacWorld for the post.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard can be upgraded directly to OS X Mountain Lion, assuming the final release maintains the same capacity as the currently available developer previews. To perform the direct upgrade as it stands today, users will need to have created an OS X Mountain Lion USB installer from which to boot off of and upgrade with, though there is a possibility that a Snow Leopard Mac will also have access to Mountain Lion directly from the Mac App Store.

We have received many questions about this in our inboxes and comments and figure with the OS X Mountain Lion release date set for summer it’s a good time to answer it based on currently available information. It’s important to note this upgrade path is based off of the current developer previews of Mountain Lion and upgrade eligibility could change before the public release, it’s also possible that Apple won’t officially support upgrading from Mac OS X 10.6 to 10.8 and this could remain an unofficial and unsupported feature.

A fair amount of OS X Snow Leopard users have held off on upgrading to OS X Lion, but with the release of Mountain Lion around the corner it’s quite likely a lot of OS X 10.6.8 holdouts will jump directly to OS X 10.8 if it is possible. Mountain Lion does have stricter system requirements than it’s predecessor, however, and some owners of older Mac hardware could wind up with Lion being the last supported version of OS X on their machines.

We will update with additional information on the various Mac upgrade paths to OS X Mountain Lion as further details become available.

By using Mac OS X Smart Folders, anyone can quickly access all files they were working on yesterday without caring about where they were stored or what folders they reside in. There are two ways to set this up, the first will utilize a quick modification to “All My Files” and the second will be more inclusive by creating a custom Smart Folder.

Method 1) Access Yesterdays Files & Work with All My Files

This is the easiest approach, all you need to do is modify how an existing folder arranges files:

1. Open “All My Files” from the OS X Finder, unless set otherwise this is the default new finder window
2. Click on the “Arrange” button and choose “Date Modified”
3. Scroll down to find “Yesterday” in the list, these are all your files from yesterday

Alternatively, you can select “Date Last Opened” from the Arrange menu, though the moment you open a file it will move from Yesterday to Today in All My Files.

Method 2) Find Yesterdays Files & Work with a Smart Folder

The second approach uses a new Smart Folder to find all files that were modified within the past day, so if you modify a file from yesterday sometime today it will remain accessible in the same smart folder. This is a bit smarter than the All My Files method above, and it will also include user preference and library files, modified plists, iTunes playlists, downloads, and any other file that has been modified by the user within a day.

1. From the OS X Finder, hit Command+Option+N to create a new Smart Folder
2. Click on “All My Files” at the top to limit the search to files owned by the active user
3. Click the (+) button to add a new search parameter and choose “Last modified date” and set is to “within last” and enter “1 days”



4. Finally, click the “Save” button and name the search “Recent Work” or something similar, and select “Add To Sidebar” for easy future access from Finder windows

The newly created smart folder is now accessible from any Finder window, just look for the gear icon next to “Recent Work” in the sidebar and click on it to open a constantly updated folder of all files modified within the past day.

There are a variety of ways to further improve these Smart Folders, but to keep this article relatively simple we’ll limit it to a single search parameter for now.

Apple has issued an update to OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3. The new build comes as 12A193i and is available through Software Update, which in turn downloads through the Mac App Store, making the update available to all developers with OS X Mountain Lion DP3 currently installed.

Noticeable changes in the new OS X 10.8 build are to Mission Control, Messages, System Preferences, Notifications Center, iCloud integration, and Preview app, but otherwise there do not appear to be significant differences in the Developer Preview 3.1 update. Of course, many bug fixes and resolutions to issues identified in the previous build have also been included, and an update to XCode 4.4 Developer Preview 4 was released alongside the update to build applications for the latest developer release.

OS X Mountain Lion is scheduled to be released to the public in late summer of 2012 and is expected to have more stringent system requirements than OS X Lion.

Full Screen apps in Mac OS X are managed by Mission Control, this means that if switch beween or gesture swipe from one full screen app to a desktop or another app, it follows the order of desktops and apps shown at the top of Mission Control. This also means that you can rearrange the placement of fullscreened apps easily just by clicking on one of the app windows and dragging and dropping it beyond another Desktop or full screen app. Now anytime you swipe between desktops or apps, you’ll find the app in its new placement.

We’ve covered a similar tip showing how to move Desktops around to rearrange their order within Mission Control as well.

Mac OS X Lion introduced the file locking feature, which causes any files to automatically lock themselves after a period of time to prevent accidental edits from occurring. You’ve probably seen the resulting message lock before, informing you a file has been locked because recent changes haven’t been made. The time it takes for that automatic file locking to take effect can be adjusted:

1. Open System Preferences from and click on “Time Machine”
2. Click “Options”
3. Look for “Lock documents _ after last edit” and click the pull down menu, selecting a new time duration before the file is locked by OS X

2 weeks is the default which I find to be overly aggressive and I choose 1 month instead, but some users may want locking to take effect even quicker and Apple offers the extraordinarily quick “1 day” option for those who want the utmost in protection from accidental edits.

In the same settings panel you can also choose to disable file locking completely just by unchecking the checkbox, though that isn’t recommended for most users.

For those dual booting between OS X Mountain Lion and OS X Lion, or any other two versions of OS X for that matter, there comes a time when you inevitably want to remove one of the operating systems. For this walkthrough we’ll assume the boot partition you want to delete is one of the developer previews of OS X Mountain Lion but it could be any other OS X boot volume as well.

It would be a wise idea to backup your Mac before proceeding, you will be editing the partition map of the drive and there is always a possibility something could go wrong.

From OS X Lion:

1. Open Disk Utility and select the primary hard drive
2. Click on “Partition”
3. Select the “Mountain Lion” partition and click the [-] button to delete the partition



4. Confirm the partition removal and quit Disk Utility
5. Reboot Mac OS X and hold down the Option key during boot, select “Recovery” from the boot menu
6. Open Disk Utility and select the hard drive, again selecting the “Partition” tab
7. Click and drag the partition resizer all the way to the bottom, then click “Apply” and “Partition” to confirm resizing (*see below if you get a “Partition Failed” error)



8. Reboot Mac OS X as usual

* If you encounter a “Partition Failed” error resolve it by running fsck from single user mode:

• Hold Command+S at startup and type “fsck -fy”
• Reboot OS X as usual, then launch Disk Utility to resize the partition

When Mac OS X reboots the partition space that used to be allocated to OS X Mountain Lion will now be allocated back to the primary operating system, OS X Lion.

Apple has released OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3 to those registered with the Mac Developer program. The new build comes as 12A178q and includes many bug fixes, though it still includes a fairly lengthy list of known issues and bugs. This is the third beta release of OS X Mountain Lion, which currently has a rough public release date of “Summer” .

Developers can download OS X Mountain Lion DP3 from the App Store, though logging in through the developer center is necessary in order to receive a redemption code.

Due to stability issues and future upgrade problems, Mountain Lion Developer Preview should not be the primary operating system on a Mac. Follow a guide to set up a dual boot system between OS X 10.8 Beta and the more stable OS X 10.7 build for best results.