Mountain Lion speculations

No, not the animal! John Gruber has a teaser article on his blog with some speculation about the next release of Mac OS X, "Mountain Lion".

Now that Apple has become the top tech company, it's worth spending time keeping track of what they're thinking and where they're going, and Gruber has always been one of the top Apple-watchers.

The recurring theme: Apple is fighting against cruft — inconsistencies and oddities that have accumulated over the years, which made sense at one point but no longer — like managing to-dos in iCal (because CalDAV was being used to sync them to a server) or notes in Mail (because IMAP was the syncing back-end). The changes and additions in Mountain Lion are in a consistent vein: making things simpler and more obvious, closer to how things should be rather than simply how they always have been.

And while you're thinking and musing about all things Apple, you might want to have a look at Danny O'Brien's recent article about Apple's design philosophy, Bret Victor's presentation, and how design philosophies are playing a much larger part in areas of computer software that used to be all-about-technology, nothing-about-design, such as operating systems, file systems, networking, etc.

Twenty years ago, it was about getting it done at all.

Now it's about getting it done elegantly and in a fashion that anyone can use.