

In fact, Mountain Lion provides plenty of opportunities to share from apps. Notification Center will provide buttons to post to Twitter and to Facebook, but Facebook integration won't arrive until autumn, perhaps coinciding with iOS 6. If you don't want to be bothered, a switch at the top temporarily disables alerts. Notifications can be set to appear as alerts instead of banners, which stay on screen so you don't forget about them. If you don't click on a banner, it disappears off the right side of the desktop and sits in Notification Center until you have time to deal with it. Messages from your chosen 'VIPs', along with other notifications, appear in a banner at the top right of the desktop, a lot like the Growl system used by some Mac apps. The VIP feature from iOS 6 also comes to OS X, so you can ignore (or switch off) the incoming Mail sound, but still keep an eye on important things.

In iOS, you pull it down from the top of the screen in OS X, you use two fingers on your Magic Trackpad to swipe in from the right edge, sliding the desktop a little to the left to reveal it.

The Mac gets its own version of iOS's Notification Center. Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Notification Center
