A friend of mine just showed this site to me today, which I apparently missed when it first debuted several months ago. It’s a nearly perfect re-creation of the Apple Keynote presentation-making application — or as nearly perfect as can be expected within a Web browser — built with the Cappuccino Web framework, which enables “desktop class applications” through JavaScript.

280 Slides is an impressive piece of work, but I wonder if it isn’t somewhat quixotic too. Though browser applications will inevitably become more desktop-like as they become more powerful, that doesn’t mean they should be designed to look and function like the software that lives on your hard drive. It’s still important to be true to the medium and the platform. That’s why Gmail is such a huge success; it doesn’t try to ape the desktop. Rather it makes the most of the strengths and weaknesses of the browser. Trying to re-create the desktop experience note-for-note seems like an ill-advised way to create a great browser application.

Designer Tom Genoni offers up a quick tool for creating layout grids, with fine-tuned control over gutters and margins, and drag-and-drop placeholders for advertising units. Not the first of its kind, but slightly more robust than others. A great start.

An unmitigated calamity of a public service announcement from the early 1990s: an anti-gang lecture delivered in miserably watered-down hip-hop style, accompanied by a jaw-droppingly banal video narrative. Given the distance of years, it comes across as both hilarious and horrible.

“Dozens of Apple patent applications were published today revealing research that Apple had done in 2007 on many topics encompassing future versions of Mac OS X. The most intriguing is a series of patent applications which describe a ‘multidimensional’ user interface. Apple has essentially been working on true 3D desktop environments.”

A visual exercise in breaking down various Disney cartoon characters into their constituent shapes, using three-dimensional rendering software.

Everyone’s favorite tee-shirt aggregator published their picks for the best tees to give as gifts this holiday season. I wrote about Rumplo in June and still find that browsing its catalog is one of the more entertaining ways to waste one’s workday. Not that I do that.

Amid Amidi’s recently launched companion site to his book “Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation.” In case you missed that one, published two years ago, it’s an illuminating exploration of the mostly forgotten and/or under-appreciated talents that reinvented postwar cartoons as expressions of Modern abstraction. The result is a school of visual rendering that’s remembered with great fondness by many. Also, don’t forget Amidi’s Cartoon Brew, which is also excellent.