According to anonymous tipsters, Apple could be working on bringing AirPlay mirroring and iMessages to the Mac in the upcoming months. 9to5 Mac, while stating that the project may not see the light of day, has indicated that “they are definitely on the table for release in future versions of OS X Lion.”
AirPlay and Mirroring to the Mac
Hopefully the integration of AirPlay will be system wide, including applications like iTunes, Safari, and other AV programs on the Mac. According to 9to5 Mac we could see it in QuickTime, as well a system utility to mirror the entire desktop to a projector via an Apple TV. These are all potentially useful applications for AirPlay and probably should have been released months ago.
I hope — and this may be a pipe dream — that Apple will let us send all system audio to an Apple TV by simply changing our output in the System Preferences or by option + clicking the speaker icon in the menu bar. Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, an AirPlay icon in the menubar would probably be the best implementation system wide, instead of on an app by app basis, kind of like how AirPlay is integrated into the App Dock in iOS.
iMessage coming to the Mac too
The second part of this rumor is that iMessage is also coming to the Mac. The report speculates that iMessage could be integrated into iChat. Hopefully this means a complete reworking of iChat as opposed to a simple integration. The more I use iMessage, the more I’ve come to rely on it as my primary messaging application. Getting those messages to my Mac, whether by email or text-messsage, would be extremely useful.
Currently, and it could be poor configuration on my part, iMessage only seems to sync messages across iOS that are sent to an email address and not a phone number. I’m sure it wouldn’t take much for Apple to grab the messages sent to my telephone number and reroute them to my iPad or even my Mac.
There are a lot of things from iOS that I hope make it into OS X, and these are the two at the top of my list. The sooner the better, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard.
