John Gruber:

And instead of a room full of writ­ers, jour­nal­ists, and ana­lysts, it was just me, Schiller, and two oth­ers from Apple — Brian Croll from prod­uct mar­ket­ing and Bill Evans from PR. [...]

Handshakes, a few pleas­antries, good hot cof­fee, and then, well, then I got an Apple press event for one.

Is this how Apple will be intro­duc­ing major OS X releases from here on? Gruber shares his gut feeling:

Apple didn’t want to hold an event to announce Mountain Lion because those press events are pre­cious. They just used one for the iBooks/education thing, and they’re almost cer­tainly on the cusp of hold­ing a major one for the iPad.

Apple sure is doing some things dif­fer­ently. Here are the new fea­ture of Mountain Lion that I am most excited about:

• iCloud inte­gra­tion: Documents, and many more, are auto-synced. I don’t use DropBox any­more, but even if I was I would prob­a­bly ditch it. All pre-loaded apps and those avail­able on the App Store will have iCloud sync­ing deeply integrated.
• Notes: Take notes on your Mac and it shows up on your iPhone and vice versa. I didn’t quite under­stand why Apple had notes show up in Mail, but I’m glad Notes on iOS is com­ing to OS X. Now I can stop look­ing for a decent auto-synced notes app.
• Reminders: The same seam­less expe­ri­ence as with Notes. It will be a chal­lenge for todo list apps to dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself. If I find the default apps good enough for me I am highly unlikely to pay for a third-party app that is mar­gin­ally better.
• Messages: Send texts to iPhones, and receive text mes­sages from them. For free. Very nice.

Update: Software Update will move to the App Store. I never under­stood where Apple drew the line when updat­ing soft­ware to use Software Update or the App Store. Now I don’t have to understand.

Update 2: The Messages app, in beta, is avail­able as a free down­load. I’ve been using it today to text a few folks and the expe­ri­ence so far is fan­tas­tic. A side ben­e­fit is I don’t get ripped off by some wire­less car­rier. Like texts sent using iMes­sage these texts are free. I don’t nor­mally stay con­nected to Skype, the only app I occa­sion­ally use to IM on my Mac, but I don’t have any urge to quit Messages; in fact I think Messages will be the first IM client in a very long time that will always be running.