Not actually Google Chrome OS, but it may look something like this :)

"Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,"

That is how Google broke the news that they are developing a brand new OS. Surprised? Well yes actually I am. It's a bold move for starters, diversifying into a market where Microsoft has had such a monopoly for many years. But then again Google have never shied away from bold moves, maybe at long last we can have a truly competitive OS market.

"Re-think what operating systems should be."

So what is it going to be/do? Well initial reports and speculation seem to point towards some sort of browser that sits above a cut down Linux kernel. So I wouldn't expect tons of propriety PC apps to work on it, Microsoft Office for example, but it's designed for a netbook/notebook not a desktop PC. That's not to say it wouldn't work well for some people on a Desktop and I'm sure Google will produce their own apps, they've shown in the past there pretty good at that (Google Docs/Gmail anybody?). Google Chrome OS is definitely aimed at targeting users who just want to boot up and logon to the net and interestingly Google are talking of boot up times in seconds not minutes.

Being web designers and developers what does this mean for us? Well in the grand scheme of web design and development, sat in Rochdale on a rainy day, not much, certainly not until we can get hold of it, but I would say it's safe bet that the chrome browser framework will be used extensively in the OS as well, so as long as we keep catering for Google Chrome all will be well.

We like Twitter, here at Sizzle. We don't really 'get' it, but we like it nonetheless. However, we were recently struck upon a conundrum - how to integrate our most recent 'tweets' into our site using ASP. We could find code snippets for PHP and ASP.Net, but not ASP itself. Fortunately, we eventually happened upon a ridiculously simple solution: Use your Twitter's RSS feed!

Using the code from here and substituting our RSS feed for the provided example, we were able to easily pull down our 20 most recent tweets. A bit of code-chopping, and we trimmed it down to a svelte layout. We were nearly done, but not quite... Our links were being served as plain, unclickable text! So we implemented this nifty yet very basic bit of business to separate out link-laden tweets and add the appropriate <a> tag:

..And voila! Our tweets, served up in lovely div classes, ready for insertion into our Javascript-powered homepage box. Note: By default, the linked script caches RSS feeds for 1 hour, which'll stop your server from harassing Twitter's too much. It's easily amendable, but we're not sure if we'd recommend it.