Apple made a number of big announcements at thier World Wide Developers Conference today. In case you missed them or are not familiar with what I am even talking about, there is plenty of good coverage elsewhere. I will not retread those well covered tracks because, while fast new computers, shinny new features and jabs at the fine folks in Redmond are fun, what really has me excited is the upcoming tranformation of Mail.app into a true productivity application. Looks like they have been drinking the GTD kool-aid in Cupertino.

The next version of Mac OS X, code named Leopard, will feature a greatly enhanced version of Mail that will also have to-do’s and notes integrated. What is even more is that the to-do fuction will actually be a system wide service so that any item, be it an e-mail, note, document, etc. will be able to be made into an actionable to-do.

This is huge. What Apple seems to understand is that the future is not only about how we access information, it is more about how we process it. It is about how we take all of these ious bits we have incoming from all directions and make them actionable. Allowing me to take any item and make it actionable – built right in and as part of the OS would be a godsend. Especially if that means any appplication will be able to take advantage of that. That seems to be the direction Apple is going.