I use Beluga all the time. However, I have a feeling it'll be killed off soon.

I wonder if they'll offer it for free.

It'll be free. It's listed as Twitter for Mac and all of the official Twitter apps are free, regardless of platform.

I never thought the new Mac app store would have free non demo apps. In realize that the iOS store has free apps, but there, it's the only way to get apps onto the phone for most people.

Existing users will be locked in even more to Facebook. New users will sign up as many of their friends start to rely on the new service.

Exactly. Which is why when the linked writer finishes his snarky observation with: "Facebook Messaging is bad? No. It just isn’t built for you."

I pause for a moment.

I think it's equally lucid to think "but I don't want to step onto your lawn!" as it is to denigrate the "get off my lawn" mentality.

The privacy implications wavered by others, if not frivolously, then for other reasons, are still of concern to me. Regardless of whether or not I'm happy to waiver them myself.

and a company whose business is bypassing privacy to learn about consumers, will have a record of all telecom between those consumers

I was hoping for an App Store to be introduced. Imagine the type of functionality this would enable on our TVs. You could have TV-optimized apps to check the weather, traffic, sports scores, show times, or stream video from other sources like Vimeo or Hulu. To get around watching videos you've downloaded elsewhere, there might be an Air Video like app which transcodes videos on the fly for viewing non-supported files.

This could also be Apple's trojan horse into the console market. There are already thousands of games available on the iPhone and iPad. It wouldn't be too hard to port many of them over to this platform since they're all running iOS. Perhaps you can use your existing iPod touches/iPhones as input devices. There's so much potential without even looking at the TV-content side of the business.

Since its got the hardware inside there's always the possibility that this functionality magically appears in iOS 4.3 or similar.

It happened with apps and the original iPhone, I think Apple would be happy to wait until they have a polished product for launch and then announce rather than pre-announce before it's ready.

I understand that the node community is still very young but hopefully they'll start consolidating around some of the core libraries/frameworks pretty soon. For example, I haven't seen a consensus for the best testing or packaging libraries.

Yup, I only learned about this feature a few months ago. It also makes other apps like the standard Google Reader usable.

He is the API.

Google should write a FAQ on what happens when their prediction API becomes self-aware

No, it's an alternative implementation of Ruby 1.9 that allows you to interface directly with native OS X frameworks.

It's actually a bit more profound than that. macruby objects are Cocoa objects, so all of the funny edge cases that we used to have problems with in RubyCocoa have just gone away. For example, in RubyCocoa, if you try to serialise a proxy object representing a Cocoa object using YAML, and then read that object back in, the proxy is no longer created, and if you try to pass the object to a Cocoa API, the program crashes, because Cocoa was expecting a Cocoa object... The same operation in macruby works just fine (well, apart from the fact that YAML is evil, but at any rate, I have a macruby app that uses it, and it works fine)