awesome isn’t it ?

however, i am not certain that two twitterstreams from different users can be put into separate metanotes on the same page – i kept finding a bug sorta

if this could be fixed, omg, a wall of your twitter friends, could be awesome.

Microsoft’s Application Features in Mac OS X, System Wide. Microsoft’s business model of tacking on features hasn’t been a total wash. The company’s desperate efforts to invent novel marketing features for every new release of Windows and Office have pioneered a number of ideas that have later found their way into Mac OS X. One example is the idea of Fast User Switching, which Apple added to Panther. Windows XP pioneered the trick, but built it upon the kluge that is Terminal Services.

Microsoft also helped originate the basis of Ajax web apps by inventing XMLHttpRequest in order to make its Outlook Web Access 2000 web app work decently within Internet Explorer. Today, standards-based web apps are eating a hole into Microsoft’s monopoly on the proprietary desktop platform, and tools such as SproutCore and resulting products such as MobileMe are poised to tear down interoperability barriers and level the playing field. Microsoft may now regret having opened Pandora’s Box in terms of standards-based web applications, but its efforts to seal the web back up with the proprietary Silverlight plugin, which turns web apps into .NET programs, will now be next to impossible.

Another example of a Microsoft innovation are the fancy text features in Word, such as red underlining to highlight spelling mistakes and the green squiggle for grammar errors. Word also features a variety of word auto correction, smart dash insertion, and text replacement features (such as typing TM to get the ™ character). The former have already become system-wide features in Mac OS X, while sources indicate that the latter text processing features will find their way into Snow Leopard, and therefore every application that runs on it.

Among the technologies profiled earlier in Myth 3 that have been trickling from the iPhone into Mac OS X, there’s at least one idea I proposed for the iPhone that will be in Snow Leopard’s Safari: self contained web apps. The new feature will allow users to run web applications as a local app in its own window, essentially making the web platform into a native-looking app that can run outside of Safari.

I proposed a similar feature as a possibility for the iPhone prior to the announcement of the Cocoa Touch SDK: web apps packaged up into a set of files that could be run on the device as a Dashboard widget-like standalone app, even when off the network. Why Apple hasn’t pursued such an obvious strategy is a little hard to figure out, but it seems they’ve got the ball rolling on the desktop.

That ball will be rolling even faster thanks to SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript interpreter that will make Safari and any other WebKit-based browsers, standalone self contained apps, and Dashboard widgets all a lot faster. Apple’s MobileMe, Yahoo’s Flickr, and Google various web apps will all gain new speed thanks to faster JavaScript execution. SquirrelFish will also raise the bar in performance and efficiency in the Rich Internet Applications sector in general, giving Flash, Silverlight, and Java a faster, simpler, and more openly interoperable runtime to compete against.