Seemingly out of nowhere, at least for me for which this announcement jumped out me as I was browsing Cult of Mac, Apple has announced today the next version of OS X, to be dubbed Mountain Lion.
Delving into the details of the upgrade, Apple is continuing the process of migrating iOS applications and features back to the Mac. Most notable is the new Messaging app, Notification Center, operating system wide Twitter integration, and GameCenter. Messaging completely replaces iChat, much like Facetime allowing communication between your Mac and any iOS device. In fact, Apple has made the beta version of the application available here. Notifications Center finally provides a native notifications application/system, apparently almost identical to how it appears and operates on iOS. It will definitely be interesting to see how quickly developers get on board, as well as how the system competes with the current notifications solution for Mac users Growl. iOS 5 introduced full Twitter integration to the mobile operating system, and now that integration has found it's way to the Mac. Finally, there isn't too much to say on GameCenter past the unification it allows between desktop and mobile iOS gaming.
While I'm giddy at the thought of a new iteration of OS X, that feeling get's spoiled by the feeling that this upgrade feels, at least to me, to be coming far too soon. The current version of OS X, Lion, has only been publicly available for less than a year. It will be closer to a year by Mountain Lion's release, but that is a ridiculously short amount of time before essentially making it obsolete.
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