I’ll be posting my thoughts on Mountain Lion over the next months so I thought I’d just preface each of the posts with “Mountain Lion”. This is the first of those posts.
With the announcement of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple seems to be shifting away from tossing more and more features into the apps they already have. The first indication of this might have been a separate FaceTime application from iChat. Now, we see them take it to another level.
Here is some of the “decoupling” going on:
- Separate Reminders app (taking them out of Calendar/iCal)
- Separate Notes app (taking them out of Mail)
- Separate FaceTime app (not baking into Messages/iChat)
The last one was already done, and you could argue that Messages/iChat has actually been added onto by tossing iMessage capability onto it, but it would have “made sense” to add FaceTime as well. That is not to mean there is no integration, but that there are separate apps.
Perhaps this is the start of a longer-term trend for the Mac? Will we see Music and Video coming soon as they try to decouple all of iTunes’s functionality into smaller, more nimble applications?
Regardless, it is a change to see more focused applications. That is on aspect of iOS I am happy to see coming over.