I’ve just stumbled upon Cobook thanks to a Lifehacker post.

This simply looks as the best Address Book app for Mac OS X ¹ to me.

I’d go even further: this is how Apple should have designed its own Address Book: always available, non-intrusive, fully accessible by keyboard, connected to social networks ² and above all really, really smart. For instance, Cobook guesses what kind of data you’re adding to a contact. And you can add tags to your contacts, to sort/retrieve them more easily.

Cobook lives in your menubar by default but it can be detached, thus becoming a normal, resizable, minimizable window.

You’d better watch the introductory video for a quick-guided tour.

Cobook is still in beta for now, the final release should be available in 1-2 months, according to the official Twitter account for the app.

Push notifications are a way for websites to send small messages to users when the user is not on the site. iOS and Android devices already support their own push notification services, but we want to make notifications available to the whole web.

In a recent blog post I’ve just discovered thanks to Ars Technica, Jeff Balogh exposes the work in progress.

Seems exciting! Especially if it one day becomes a standard integrated into other browsers.

My main fear would be distractions. However, the wiki page lists user control as one of the core principles of the project (which was a given — we’re talking about Mozilla here after all):

Control: The user should be able to disable or delete any created notification channel. Upon deletion, the user should not see any additional messages sent to that channel. The sender should be notified that messages to that channel are no longer being accepted.