Operating Systems usually provides “shortcuts” for that purpose: one click or a menu command is enough to launch your favourite application.

On the other hand, the browser do not provide the same ease-of-use. Of course, you can use bookmarks but they don’t come with a specific context.

In terms of usability, a (good) classic desktop application provide a clear interface and help you focus on your task. It’s not only a matter of features, but mostly of building a user experience (UX) around a specific usage context.

With Google Chrome and its market place, there is a new trend to better organize your web applications. Chrome provides a nice feature in the Tools menu: create an application shortcut. But only to Windows users, Mac OS X is waiting for this since 2009!

Firefox 4 takes a really nice approach to this problem with the new Pin as App Tab feature. You can now have a quick launch icon next to your browser’s tabs.

I hope there will soon be an Spotlight feature in modern browsers (or like Humanized Enso). I really would appreciate a CTRL+space then get a nice launcher of my favorite web applications, with a quick thumbnails, the right user environment (login/password/cookies), and  a minimal browser overhead (no tabs, no url, no status bar, …).

For the moment you basically have 3 ways to handle that kind of web application shortcuts under Mac OS X:

1. Hack Google Chrome with a shell script
2. Use the well know Mozilla Prism, which does the job pretty well (except you can’t have tabs and that can be messy with google docs for e.g.)
3. Or try Fluid, a Prism-like application with more settings but maybe a little slower

Feel free to share any other option, especially if you know a WebSpotLight

For the moment, I’m not a big fan of the Market application itself, because I found it to be not so handy to find application. Indeed, there are no sorting feature but only predefined sections, no auto-completion when you search an application by its name, the listing is not self-explaining (name+company but no quick descr). I hope these “small bugs” will be addressed soon…

Anyway, here is a quick short list of applications I installed during last week (and I intend to keep):

• Barcode Scanner
• Deezer
• Dropbox (and also https://www.dropbox.com/anywhere )
• eBuddy
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Google Finance
• Google Goggles
• Opera Mini
• Seesmic
• Shazam
• Gtalk
• Twitter (or http://m.twitter.com/ )

That’s only the beginning and I definitely could use some advice of other experimented droid users

Anyway, I’m still waiting for the buzz activation in my Gmail but I had some fun yesterday on the iPod touch. Looks like Google Buzz may overcome twitter, facebook and everything else by aggregating all the mess, fuzz, buzz in one “clean centralized place”.

In these challenges, Apple is usually quite good at making WOW effect products. And somewhat yesterday the whole mac planet was waiting for such a big bang as when the iPhone came out. And yeah, Apple did a fine job, but not a great one as expected… This iPad is finally a nice giant iPhone without GPS and camera but including iWork (and iBooks).

This morning I have a bittersweet feeling that I can pinpoint to some missing or disappointing elements:

1. A thick border !  Why after the slim and tiny MacBook Air (and the whole MacBook family), did Apple release such a large ugly border screen ?
2. Let’s go back to the … past 4×3 aspect ratio ? I mean everybody is now HD or  Full HD in a cinema compliant 16×9 aspect ratio.
3. No webcams… no comments…
4. iPhone OS based huh! I get the technical/battery life/optimization idea, but why push so much work in porting iWork on iPhone OS. Or on the other hand why not offer the full Mac OS X SDK on a tablet computer ?
5. No GPS = No Location Based Service… sad again.

All these factors, let me really think that the iPad is finally an iDraft. A firts version not fully polished as we were used to by Apple and Steve.
EDIT: I just find out the mashable iPad missings article. I should add SD cards and HDMI in my list…

The Apple iPad

The Wavyx MacPad

Here is my ideal iPad:  a nice thin 16×9 device. You’ll notice the front webcam is upside, but I’m not it wouldn’t be better on the left side to ease video conferences with multiple contacts. On the back, I put 2 webcams. I know it’s too much but I was thinking about some Augmented Reality application  that could better capture the 3D environment with 2 webcams. So let’s say it’s an optional feature

By the way, it has a GPS and it’s of course Mac OS based, so more a MacPad  or MacTouch.

PS: I still searching through the specs, to find how much RAM is bundled but I hope it’s enough to have bigger application with less memory problems as on iPhone.