Apple isn’t taking any prisoners with their latest installment of Mac OS X. Announced yesterday, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion continues 10.7’s trend of moving successful concepts from iOS to OS X. One of those announced features was Share Sheets. Applications running in Mountain Lion now have the ability to access a drop-down menu for sharing content.
While most of the sharing capability was there before, this is a unified, simple interface for sharing. You can email or IM the contents of a website to your friends and clients, or you can save something to your reading list. More interesting is the integration with third party services.
With 10.8, we now have the ability to tweet in-app just like iOS 5 allows. Just click the drop-down, and start typing. The content you’re looking at is automatically added as a link for you. Even coolr is Flickr and Vimeo integration. Just finish editing your latest masterpiece? One click, and you can upload it directly to Vimeo. Take a great picture of the new grandbaby? Send it to Flickr to show Grandpa.
Apple’s willingness to work with third party services is a strength. They know they can’t own microblogging, photo sharing, and video sharing (yet), so they let their users take advantage of services that already exist. It’s incredibly smart, and it allows Apple to focus on their core products. Maybe Google could learn a thing or two. That’d be nice.
