Mountain Lion's "Major New Features"

This will probably be the least insightful blog you read about Apple's latest OS update for Mac (Mountain Lion). I'm not a fan of Mac, I've been using Windows since 3.1 and am frankly lost on a Mac. I was once asked to help copy a file from one Mac to another in my wife's classroom, and could not figure it out. I had to email to myself on one machine, and download on the other. That doesn't mean that I think Windows is necessarily a better OS, it just doesn't work for me.

Now that we've got the disclosure out of the way...

So, I was reading a few blogs about the new OS to see if Apple put anything really interesting in there. John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog lists 3 "major new features".

1. Easy signup with iCloud when you first log in
2. Integration with iCloud built right into the Open and Save dialog box
3. Changes to some apps, renaming some others

The iCloud integration right down to the Open/Save dialog is a nice feature. It seems similar to what Microsoft is doing with SkyDrive in Windows 8. I think this feature is fantastic, no more having to backup your documents, photos and music. Anything you save in those cloud services will be available anywhere.

I would not describe the other 2 "major new features" as either major, nor features of the OS.

OK, OK, maybe the OS prompting you to sign up for an iCloud account when you log in is in fact an OS feature. But it's hardly major. It's just an extension of the iCloud integration with the OS. It's a sub-feature of a major feature.

The one that really shocked me (and prompted me to respond with a blog post) was the changes to the Apps. To quote John's description:

"Apps have been renamed for cross-OS consistency. iChat is now Messages; iCal is now Calendar; Address Book is now Contacts. Missing apps have been added: Reminders and Notes look like Mac versions of their iOS counterparts. Now that these apps exist for the Mac, to-dos have been removed from Calendar and notes have been removed from Mail, leaving Calendar to simply handle calendaring and Mail to handle email."

Except in the case of really poor and/or misleading app names, I don't think renaming apps is a feature. If anyone out there disagrees, I would love to hear from you.

I also don't think taking features out of one app, and creating a separate app to contain those same features much of a feature in itself. I see it as a reflection of the tendency towards specialization in app development. Rather than one app that does a dozen things with varying degrees of excellence, the tendency today is to create one app that does one thing excellent. Then create another that does something else excellent.

And lastly, these apps are not features of the OS. Maybe this is just a bias I have as a Windows user, but apps, even if they are installed by the OS by default are still just apps. You can't buy an app that is going to get iCloud services to integrate with your Open/Save dialog anymore than you buy an app that's going to get SkyDrive to do the same in Windows. You can buy an app to replace iChat with Messages. In fact, there is probably no reason that you couldn't replace iChat with Messages in the current Max OS.
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