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In a rather surprising new behavior, Apple announced the next generation Mac operating system, 10.8 aka Mountain Lion, by giving press folks a developer preview *before* the developers. In addition, Apple made an announcement outside of their usual venues - the Apple campus, Moscone or Yerba Buena. Personally, I think that Apple's next public announcement will be huge (think iPad 3!).
Anyway, Mountain Lion developer preview is now available to developers, of course. I have yet to download it, but one new feature has been made available as a beta, and that is Messages. Messages is Mac OS X iChat and iOS iMessage combined.
Not too long ago, I wrote about bringing FaceTime support on both iOS and Mac OS X and that happened. Next thing I wrote was about bringing iMessage on iOS to interface with iChat, and Apple simply did that. You can now download Messages as a beta app, only if you are running Lion.
Messages is definitely on beta, i.e., there are bugs and lots of it. First thing to notice, if you hide or minimize the app, your message history gets cleared. Not good. Second, unlike Facetime, you will not get a notification when you receive messages unless Messages is running.
Third, launching Facetime from within the application will fire the FaceTime app instead of having an integrated service. The same goes true for other instant messaging protocols (iChat will fire up).
Despite these bugs, it is functional. I have tried sending from one Mac to another, from iPhone to the Mac and Mac to iPad, and all worked perfectly fine -- getting replies as well.
What does this mean? First off, SMS will definitely get hit. One can send messages to an iPhone without resorting to the carrier's SMS -- mobile data connection required, of course. iMessage already saved me money, and with desktop SMS capability, it definitely will save me more. This is akin to Chikka, remember that desktop IM service that sends and receives SMS messages?
One flaw of Messages is that it is exclusive to iOS devices and Macs only. I am confident that Apple will release Messages for Windows as well. When this happens, it will be encouraging users to buy an iOS device or two.
So, if you are running Lion on your Mac, download the beta app and help Apple test it. They are testing the infrastructure, for sure. Apple needs to tweak their servers to be able to scale up once Messages comes out of beta.
--MB