Something struck me about Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion. Yes, it’s another cat in a 10 year lifespan of Mac cats that bear the OS X name.

It’s no longer Mac OS X. It’s just plain OS X. Simplicity rules.

Apple is app crazy these days and they’re keeping it simple and descriptive. iCal is gone and Calendar takes its place. Address Book is gone and Contacts takes its place.

Mail is email, of course. But iChat goes the way of the Dodo bird and becomes Messages, just like in iPhone and iPad.

Apps is where it’s at. Individual apps for individual needs.

All these app name changes make sense. Apple has a couple of hundred million iOS users in iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad, most of which are Windows users, so the Mac becomes more familiar by taking on some iOS dressing.

What about iTunes?

Where’s the love, Apple?

iTunes on the Mac is a mess. It needs a bunch of separate apps, just like the iPhone and iPad. One app for Music, one for Videos, one for Books, etc., et al, ad nauseam.

As a brand, everyone knows iTunes, whether Mac or Windows PC user. But iTunes has outlived its usefulness. It’s a gargantuan pile of complexity. An amalgam of apps that make usage over complex.

Come on, Apple. It’s time. Say goodbye to iTunes. It’s the 21st century. The century of apps. Bring the rest of iOS goodness to the Mac so we’ll all feel at home on our Apple devices.

Apple’s bombshell of the month, for February, is OS X Mountain Lion, the latest iteration of the Mac’s aging OS, but with plenty of iOS-inspired eye candy.

Here are 18 new features (or changes) in OS X:

#18 – OS X: It’s no longer Mac OS X. It’s OS X. On your Mac.

#17 – Goodbye iChat: Hello, Messages. It’s instant messaging, AIM, Google Talk, iChat, and FaceTime all rolled into one.

#16 – Notification Center: Apple may have been late to the notification party on the iPhone, but seamless, built-in notifications are just a trackpad swipe away in OS X Mountain Lion. Say goodbye to Growl.

#15 – Share Sheets: iPhone and iPad have this nifty button which lets you share documents, web pages, news articles, photos, movies, et al, with just a click. The same sharing shows up on the Mac in OS X 10.8.

#14 – Twitter: Just like iOS, Twitter gets built in to the Mac. Oddly, no Facebook integration.

#13 – Game Center: It was just a matter of time. Game Center is a big hit with the millions of users and tens of thousands of games for iOS devices. Expect a surge of Game Center games in the Mac App Store by the holiday season.

#12 – AirPlay Mirroring from Mac: Oh, this is sweet. AirPlay through Apple TV on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If it plays on your Mac, it’ll play on your TV (if you have Apple TV).

#11 – Reminders: I don’t use Reminders, but they’re synchronized between Mac and iCloud and iDevices. And To-do items are missing in iCal, which becomes Calendar.

#10 – Notes: Finally, a notes system that’s worth something. Notes works on all devices and syncs seamlessly using iCloud, between the devices. This is a big deal.

#9 – Contacts: Address Book is gone. Now, just as in iOS, it’s Contacts. Maybe by the time OS X Mountain Lion ships, third party apps won’t be able to steal your contact data.

#8 – Safari: What? Apple copies Google? Yep. The URL address bar combines with a search field to become both at the same time. Safari can figure out the difference between a URL and a search term. Oh, and Safari tabs can be synced up via iCloud, too.

#7 – Gatekeeper The Malware Bleeper: Apple has a new tool to protect your Mac from malware. Choose a level of protection in System Preferences. Mac apps from the App Store. Certified third party apps (by trusted developers). Or, apps developed in back alleys by malware professionals. You choose.

#6 – The China Mac Syndrome: You won’t read much about this, but OS X Mountain Lion is China friendly. Mail, Calendar, and Contacts all work with top online services in China. It’s math. How long before most of Apple’s business comes from China?

#5 – Software Update, Meet Mac App Store: It used to be that Software Update would get us the latest Apple Mac apps. Now it gets us all apps from the Mac App Store, plus Apple’s apps.

#4 – iCloud: With 100-million users already, iCloud is a big hit. And, unlike MobileMe’s forgettable launch, iCloud seems to work. Mac apps will have access to store documents on your iCloud account.

#3 – New Macs Only: Say goodbye to your old Mac if you want OS X Mountain Lion. Apple’s updated list brings the end of life upgrade to a bunch of Macs just a couple of years old.

#2 – It’s An iOS World: Gone are typical Mac terminology such as iCal and Address Book. New are Calendar and Contacts. The segregation between Mac and Apple’s other devices is about to disappear.

#1 – Multitasking: Alright, I’m cheating just to get to 18, but your Mac will still multitask, while your iPhone and iPad won’t. At least, not true multitasking the way Mac and Windows PC users understand the term. It doesn’t matter much anyway, because we’re single tasking creatures.

What happened to Siri, Apple’s popular iPhone intelligent assistant? Siri won’t show up in OS X 10.8. Apple probably needs to roll out Siri access to third party app developers before it will show up on the Mac.

The economic recovery may be going along at a snail’s pace, but the rumor mill is working three shifts a day. Guess what? Apple’s planning to introduce the iPad 3.

When? Soon.

Nobody in the know knows what features the iPad 3 will have (or, they’re not saying publicly), but already the technocratic punditry has determined that it’s too little, too late. Grumpy old man Matt Burns at TechCrunch is already bored with the iPad 3.

These rumors also state the next iPad will have higher resolution screen and high-speed data connection. But I couldn’t care less. The iPad 3, if that’s really its name, sounds like a stop-gap upgrade to me.

Stop gap? Pray tell, dear Grumpy, what would make your day?

Save the addition of an SD card slot, there isn’t a single feature I can imagine that will make me trade up to Apple’s new hotness. I guess the iPad 3 sounds great, but it also sounds boring. That’s not saying Apple won’t sell a zillion iPad 3s. It will. But it’s going to take more than a spec bump for me (and likely many others) to upgrade from the iPad 2.

4G, no? But an SD card slot, yes? Hello? Wireless? Dropbox? iCloud?

What’s wrong with Grumpy’s picture? While pissing on an unannounced product, Grumpy decides to piss on the most popular smartphone of all time.

Apple didn’t need to release the iPhone 5 in 2011 because the iPhone 4 was still outselling most other phones. Instead, Apple released the iPhone 4S, which while packing some new innards, is mostly a stop-gap solution allowing the company to milk additional revenue from supply contracts on aging components.

As if Grumpy has knowledge of Apple’s suppliers. Hello? 3G. Then 3GS. 4. Then 4S. That’s easy to follow, no? Regarding the iPad 3 (or, whatever it will be called whenever it gets here)…

Apple will likely hype a meaningless feature during the keynote, deeming it a game changer. But I’ve learned my lesson. Heads will stop spinning shortly after the event and reality will set in. Avoid the Apple spin zone. It has a tendency of sucking credit cards towards pre-order buttons.

Apple doesn’t do much hype, and the spin zone is predictable. There’s a keynote presentation followed by details on the web site, then a few TV commercials when supply is ready to distribute, but not much else. Hype?

What’s worse? Pissing on an unannounced products? Or, doing the TechCrunch hit whoring dance with link bait headlines?

Grumpy old man, indeed.

Here’s the deal. iPhone 4S success isn’t because blind lemming fanboys upgraded from iPhone 4. It’s because it’s a great phone. It’s a great ecosystem. It’s a great camera. Siri is fun and easy to use.

The iPhone 5 is likely to arrive this year and I predict it will be the best selling smartphone ever. Again. And, I predict Grumpy old men will piss on it. Again.

What’s the latest headline to grab your eyeballs by the ears (to mix a metaphor or two)?

Macgasm asks, Is WebKit slowly turning into IE6?

IE 6 is Microsoft’s much hated Internet Explorer browser; perhaps the worst browser of all time. WebKit is the guts in Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, and other browsers, and the dominant browser engine in mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android iDevices).

What’s the problem? WebKit is solid, dependable, free, and renders pages magically accurate. Again, what’s the problem?

Supposedly, some web sites are sniffing the browser user agent and filtering out non-WebKit browsers. In exchange, you get WebKit-on-mobile-device specific attributes not found on other browsers.

If nothing is done to stop this process we’ll end up with a situation similar to the days when IE6 was the dominant browser, only worse, because WebKit is also the most widely used layout engine on mobile devices.

Cry me a river.

The only commonalities in this situation are: 1) both WebKit and IE6 are browsers, 2) both browsers dominated the landscape in their heyday. After that, what? WebKit displays HTML5 and CSS wonderfully. IE6, not so much (even IE 9 is brain dead regarding web standards).

Overblown, simplistic fears notwithstanding, here’s the reality. Web sites look great on WebKit browsers. Web site developers don’t need to tweak (as much) their sites to match antiquated browser technology.

The litmus test here is simple. If WebKit were on every device, the world’s web pages would be better and viewers better off. If IE6 were on every device, web page viewing would suck.

We don’t even know what Apple’s future TV product is, but it’s already being panned by the deadbeat pseudo journalists at TechCrunch. This is what happens when journalism takes a back seat to hit whoring.

The latest headline says Apple is partnering with cable TV provides. Greg Barto’s analysis of the unreleased Apple product?

Partnering with cable companies shows that Apple didn’t (or couldn’t) put in place the deals that they wanted to in order to give us content, so they are forced to rely on the providers (cable companies) with preexisting deals. It also makes financial sense for Apple to partner with them because these cable companies already have partnerships with networks and studios, built-in customers, and a distribution network already in place to deliver content; Apple could piggyback on the infrastructure, inserting itself just in the last-stage and greatly impacting the user experience.

Huh? Viewed another way, it sounds to me like a Trojan Horse approach to getting Apple’s TV a leg up on the competition.

The iTV will change the way we interact with content, and how we experience it, but it won’t change the fact that we pay $100 each month for 100 channels we don’t want, and it won’t do anything about the fact that cable companies are terrible.

What’s worse than the phone company? The cable TV company. How could Apple go to bed with either one? First, look what the iPhone did to AT&T, Verizon, and every other cell phone carrier of substance. The iPhone rules. Cell phone carriers are merely big wireless pipes that connect you to the internet.

The Genie Is Out Of The Bottle

Already, many networks offer streaming video options or apps that do the same, bypassing the cable TV networks.

What do we want as TV watchers? We want to watch whatever we want, whenever we want. That may not happen with the first version of Apple’s TV, whatever it is. But it will come because content providers want control over their content. Apple can give them that control and take it away from cable TV.

500 television channels and nothing’s on. 100 radio stations and not one I can listen to for more than an hour.

Then, there’s Pandora. Think of it as internet music radio the way God intended. My latest app love is PandaBar, which plays and controls your Pandora account from the Mac’s Menubar.

It’s cheap, easy to use, out of the way, configurable, and comes with the right blend of extras to make it the most usable Pandora app for the Mac.

What’s not to like about this?

Click the PandaBar icon in the Menubar and get what’s playing, a button for Stations, a button to skip onward, duration, and like or dislike options.

Stations? One click to your customized stations. One click to select.

PandaBar features Growl notification support (nice at first, but distracting after awhile), keyboard hotkeys (and Apple keyboard for play, pause, and next).

It even works with your Apple Remote Control. No clutter. No complexity. Just Pandora when you want it. Even the panda bear icon is cute (I admit it; that’s what makes me look at an app). It’s cheap and available in the Mac App Store.

Shame on Pandora for requiring Adobe’s Flash plugin on the Pandora home page. Hey! Ever heard of HTML5, guys?

There’s something to be said about the old fashioned way to get news. The newspaper makes it easy to scan pages, find an interesting headline, and dig into a few details with a quick glance.

Alas, killing trees to deliver daily news is so yesteryear. Nearly everything I read these days is online. Mac, iPhone, iPad. Multiple screen sizes and shapes, and the wide variance between apps make for as much discomfort as new media makes for variety.

RSS readers deliver the headlines and a summary in typical form. You still need to click or touch to get the details, but scanning is anything but similar to a newspaper.

Check out the screen of Glance News, a popular Mac App Store app for news reading.

Yes, everything on the screen is a glance, but ohmygawd– what’s with all the screen clutter.

Contrast that with my favorite news devouring app, Flipboard on the iPad.

This is the way to get your news, but it’s iPad only. What prevents a similar interface from being utilized in a Mac app?

Obviously, the iPhone brings viewing restrictions so most news apps provide a headline, a matching graphic, and a brief summary. A tap gets you the details (or, more details and link to the original and even more details).

Just because someone can put 60 or 70 headlines on a Mac’s screen doesn’t mean they should. Show me a better interface than Flipboard for viewing the news and I’ll buy it.