By Graham K. Rogers

There have some significant changes to System Preferences in OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion with several new panels. Unchanged is the panel for CDs & DVDs which has stayed the same for the last few versions of OS X.

The CDs & DVDs panel allows users to control how the computer will behave when blank disks or disks that have media on them are inserted in the drive. Five media are included in the control: blanks CDs, blank DVDs, music CDs, picture CDs and video DVDs. The blank disks are slightly separated on the panel from the media disks. The buttons for the blank disks have more options.

Beside each of the blank disk items is a button with a number of choices, the top in each being, "Ask what to do": the Finder will alert a user and the user can then open an application, or deal with the disk in another way.

Other options available are: Open Finder, Open iTunes, Open Disk Utility, Open other application, Run script and Ignore. The blank DVD menu also has the additional item, Open iDVD.

The specific media items (music, picture, video) each have as the top selection what may be the default application for most users: iTunes, iPhoto or DVD Player (respectively). The user may select other applications, depending on what has been installed. The buttons also allow a user to run a script or "Ignore".

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Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.