In his latest post Ben Ramsey talks about web services and their future - and his future vision is in large part due to Apple and Dashboard.

I've been toying with the realization of what this means over the past few days - ever since I upgraded to Tiger, actually. I've also searched around the Web for articles, but I haven't found any, which begs the question: Has no one yet realized what's happening here, or is everyone so entrenched in the Windows vs. Linux discussions that this is completely escaping the radar of the Web development community?

Mac OS X 10.4 (known as "Tiger" to the Mac world) is pioneering a revolution. This revolution is not about hardware, nor is it particularly about software - it's about the Web and its future.

Now, Web services can run from their native platform, the Web, but be truly integrated as a desktop application, or widget, in this case. No longer does one need to pull up another browser window and click through a list of bookmarks to access this information. It's all right there on the Dashboard.

I am definitely in agreement with him on this matter - Dashboard, while limited to Mac OS X, does provide that missing piece that web services were really looking for - a seamless way to be "on the desktop" of their users. Even the PHP manual isn't immune to Dashboard's charms...