In this week's NTK Danny O'Brien breaks the most exciting — and underreported — news about the forthcoming version of Mac OS X, called "Tiger":
Why have so
few people noticed the key element of Tiger? Dashboard
provides javascript access to some safe operating system
stuff, like drawing primitives on the window canvas. And
then, when you load the gadgets up *in Safari*, you get
the same access. Meanwhile, Apple made a deal with Opera and
Mozilla the same week to add enough to the browser plugin
API to provide the same javascript objects on other
platforms and browsers. And they all forked off from the W3C
last month to set their own standard committee, WHAT-WG. For
creating web applications. Just like Joel Spolsky was asking
them to do. So we have low-level (but not insecure)
javascript access to the desktop, an open (but non-W3C)
standard, and cross-platform plugins to support it. DON'T
YOU PEOPLE UNDERSTAND? It's BROWSER WARS II – ELECTRIC
BOOGALOO!
