If you are a Web 2.0 fanatic (which, come on, who isn't these days?) then you probably know about Muxtape. For those of you who aren't religiously reading the latest Web application news at DownloadSquad, Muxtape is basically a way to share your personalized mp3 mixtape. Not only can you subscribe to the tape's RSS via iTunes, but it turns out that you can also listen to Muxtapes on your iPhone!

Just navigate over to the Muxtape page of your choosing and select a song. Mobile Safari will then load the file and begin to play it like normal mp3 audio. How cool is that?

Thanks for the info, Craig!

A thoughtful post over at FactoryJoe.com asks whether the Web failed the iPhone. Apple's initial decision to support only Web 2.0 third-party apps on the iPhone gave the web-based community a huge shot of creativity and incentive to see how far they could push the iPhone and Safari in terms of delivering a new kind of third party development. Unfortunately the lack of persistent storage and local data, a la Google Gears, crippled the effort. Perhaps Apple's development model was simply a decade ahead of its time.

Chris Messina's article calls on Web developers to improve what's going on inside the browser frame by designing and constructing new web primitives that make it simpler and easier to build for the web. He adds that "Steve was right" in that Safari development is the future of application development. If Apple had invested in richer and better Web tools, the outcry for native third party apps might never have taken off.

Web 2.0 is great and all, but I bought a Mac to utilize the power of Mac OS X and its software. While working in a browser certainly has its advantages, I believe that the sweet spot of getting work done shouldn't force the user into choosing between two appealing environments. The sweet spot of which I am speaking, of course, is integration and sync - the much sought-after, hard-to-find features that some companies offer with their products, while others at least leave the door open for enterprising 3rd parties to pick up the slack. Fortunately, one of the 'others' I speak of is 37signals with Highrise, their popular web-baesd contact and correspondence app, and the enterprising 3rd party in this case is Simon Menke, developer of Greatascent. This is one of the hands-down coolest plug-ins I've seen in a while that unites web 2.0 with what I like to call desktop 2.0 - the place where desktop apps can interact and sync with online services.

Greatascent, currently in a private beta, is a plug-in for Address Book (and soon other parts of Mac OS X) that serves as a middle man between the contacts on your Mac and those in Highrise. In its early beta state, Greatascent can pull down the contacts you're already working with in Highrise, but its real appeal is allowing you to drag and drop contacts from Address Book onto a new group that is added (pictured) to instantly sync them up to Highrise. Once synchronized, however, another gem of working in Highrise is brought to the desktop: from Address Book's File menu, you can select a Highrise contact and create a new Highrise note or task that is then synched up to the service. Read on after the jump for some screenshots and details of just how cool this plug-in can get.

I have a Treo 650 on AT&Tingular. I use the web lots. (So much, actually, that my phone bill came out to $175 last month because I downloaded so much data. Damn you, Google Maps!) The included browser isn't all that bad: especially when I can tap to mobile versions of my most-frequented sites (m.facebook, or m.twitter, for example).

Even with mobile sites, though, and particularly when browsing any-ol' page...well, it's slow.

Crowd: How slow is it?

So slow, OS X's spinning beach ball of death would tire out half way through loading NYT.com!

(Ba dum kish!...?)

Sure, there's a lot of disappointment surrounding Jobs' non-announcement announcement that developers can produce Web 2.0 apps for the iPhone, in place of actual, honest-to-goodness integrated apps a la Apple's own offerings. But Apple's emphasis on the optimization of the web for the iPhone is exactly what the forthcoming iPhone World needs: on AT&Ts paltry EDGE network, how could Apple expect us to fully make use of the full-blown internet via Safari if pages take ages to load?

While the jury will of course be out until June 29th as to whether web-based chat apps like Meebo could be used on the iPhone to work around the lack of a true, built-in chat app, David Cann has developed an experimental web interface that might bring AIM to next week's highly-anticipated gadget. The service is up and running already, allowing users to log into AIM using Cann's page, but the adjective 'experimental' is used for a reason. First, it's suffering some rocky performance due, in part, to being dugg, but it's also based simply on some JavaScript that Cann is running with his own servers (while this might scare some privacy advocates, Cann promises users that he isn't harvesting any information or chats. Do with that what you will).

Cann's iChat for iPhone service, as it's called, is also fairly limited in functionality, at least for now; this definitely isn't your Mac's iChat. Right now there are no groups, no buddy icons and opening more than 4 chats apparently is not recommended. Usage is also limited to only 10 minutes per session also, probably to help Cann sleep at night while he's tinkering with polishing this.

Still, if at least some form of iChat is strongly desired or simply a necessity for some iPhone users, this iChat for iPhone could overcome the hurdle for at least a few potential customers. Of course, we're all expecting Apple to provide a more serious solution at some point, but as with so many other Apple-related offerings, we'll just have to play the waiting game.

Our sources at WWDC are reporting that, for now, there is officially no Flash support on the iPhone. Apparently, in the State of the Media address yesterday, the announcement was made that: "There will be no Flash support at the moment on the iPhone." Developers are being told not to serve video via Flash, as there simply isn't a player built for the phone yet.

On the upside, the word 'yet' is apparently being used liberally, so things might look better for Flash on the iPhone sometime down the road.

Along with all the Mac OS X-related announcements at WWDC today, Apple also announced a solution, of sorts, to the 3rd party apps conundrum surrounding the iPhone.

Since the device's announcement at Macworld '07 earlier this year, one of the largest questions everyone had for Apple was whether the company would allow 3rd parties to develop applications for it. After all, with such a powerful device and what is likely to be a very, very broad user base, not allowing users extend the functionality of the iPhone could be a significant - if not mortal - roadblock for the device. At one point, Apple VPs confirmed there would be no 3rd party apps, and even Steve Jobs himself confirmed that the iPhone would be a closed platform in the name of security and making sure users didn't take down the West Coast AT&T network because "some application messed up." As you can imagine, this comment was widely slammed, largely because plenty of other mobile phone platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, etc.) allow for 3rd party apps, and to this day no phone has reportedly knocked out any portion of a coastal network.

Still, users and developers saw through this bizarre smoke screen and still requested a more relevant and definitive answer as to whether the iPhone will allow 3rd party apps. Eventually, Jobs began to hint at the possibility, telling the community that Apple was 'considering the possibility.' Today, finally, Steve Jobs revealed Apple's plan for allowing 3rd party apps on the iPhone, and it surprisingly involves Safari and web 2.0/AJAX technologies.

Both on stage during today's WWDC keynote and in a press release issued this afternoon, it was revealed that the iPhone will allows 3rd party apps which:

look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone's services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using Web 2.0 standards can extend iPhone's capabilities without compromising its reliability or security.

This is an interesting compromise for Apple, and one that has understandably been met with mixed fanfare. On the one hand, leveraging web technologies will allow both Mac OS X developers and web developers to easily get their apps onto the iPhone. This opens the door for a lot more people to get their apps and services on the iPhone since they won't have to learn the entirety of Mac OS X. Interestingly, this could have a serious effect on Safari's market share (or WebKit's share, depending on how you look at it), since Apple has now made their browser available for Windows and a hotly anticipated mobile device.

On the other hand, developers might understandably feel a bit constrained by the limitations of web technologies and not having full access to the iPhone's operating system like they do on a real Mac running Mac OS X. While Steve Jobs demonstrated some surprisingly powerful apps built to run in Safari on the iPhone, this doesn't mean every desktop app that users want a mobile counterpart for can sufficiently run in an environment that's limited by web 2.0 and AJAX.

Of course, it's still very early to tell; while the initial reaction to the iPhone 3rd party app compromise has been mixed, we'll all just have to wait and see what the 3rd parties can make of this system when the iPhone is released and the apps start (hopefully) rolling in.

Apple teased us with an announcement of a .Mac webmail upgrade at the end of September, and yesterday they delivered. The new webmail feels zippy (though it was understandably a little sluggish a couple times while I was testing it last night), and the innovative, refreshing new features raise the bar for competing services. Still, with all the slick new polish, a few long-standing gripes have yet to be addressed, and some of the web client's new abilities bring along irregularities and new complaints. But don't think I'm a hater - I just renewed my membership last week, and this is a most welcomed update to one of the most important components of Apple's hotly debated .Mac suite of web services. With this yin and yang balance in mind, let's dive into the review.

.Mac webmail goes web 2.0
Of course, the most significant and obvious upgrade is the completely revamped UI, which now resembles and behaves (in some ways) like Apple's desktop Mail.app client. As you can see from the screenshot, a new 3 pane view offers a folder list on the left, a customizable (10-50) message list on top, and a message preview pane on the bottom, just like mom used to make. As an added UI bonus, the separation bar between the message list and preview panes is draggable. Nice.

But the webmail update isn't just skin deep - plenty of keyboard shortcuts accompany the new polish for a great combination of beauty and brains (though I'm laying down a penalty of 10 points by not enabling the shortcuts by default, regardless of who .Mac's demographic is). A complete list of shortcuts is linked from the preferences, and there are keys for nearly every action including: sending messages, deleting, navigating up/down messages, back/forth between batches of messages (take that Gmail), searching and printing.

Besides keyboard shortcuts, some clever features and UI tricks are peppered throughout. On the left is a shot of an Address Book search, which lives below the folder list. Results are displayed below the search box, and clicking on a name offers a popup with their information, and things like email addresses and public iDisks are linked for easy access. On the right is the Quick Reply window, accessible by clicking a button which appears next to selected messages (a quirky 'only when you clicked on it' UI element that first reared its head in iTunes 7). Opera's built-in email client has done this for a while, and Apple's implementation is nice and simple.

Packrat, for those not in the know, is the only full-fledged Backpack desktop client I've ever seen, and it's especially killer because it does offline editing for all your Backpack items and pages. Its developer, Rod Schmidt, just added a key new feature that's been on everyone's request list, including mine: list reordering. This new v0.91 has a simple keyboard shortcut (cmd-r) which presents a sheet with any and all lists on a page, offering drag-and-drop reordering goodness.

Packrat is a Universal Binary and available from infiniteNIL Software for a mere $24.95. A free demo allowing the first 4 pages of your Backpack account is also available.

I've been getting somewhat annoyed with Apple's aging website for a while now, as it still even contains the striped elements of Jaguar in its navigation at the top. Not that I have any problem with Jaguar, mind you (though I have a hard time with the possibility of giving up Tiger), but for a company who's so progressive, and even a CEO who says you should upgrade iPods at least once a year, I'm just surprised we haven't seen some sort of Tiger/Unified update to just the navigation, if anything (the rest of their site, admittedly, is designed darn well).

Setting aside my gripes for a moment, reader Mark Fleser noticed that the new page for the iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED which was just announced shows that all this fancy new web 2.0 stuff hasn't been lost on Apple. Granted, this new use of AJAXy goodness seems to be only present on the Technical Specifications button at the bottom of the page, but it's a pretty handy implementation and possibly a sign of good things to come.