Prizm

The beauty of Prizm is that it's basically something that a lot of applications have been doing but on a bigger scale.

Prizm from Mozilla Labs, used to be called Webrunner, which basically was to take web based applications and make them desktop applications. This means that any sort of web application such as Google Gmail, or Mint, or anything else would basically be viewed as a desktop application without the web browser interface.

As the web and regular desktop applications start blurring the lines that separate them, we'll start to see a lot more interactive desktop applications. Strangely enough, Microsoft might have been ahead of its time when it brought Active Desktop and merged it into their operating system. But regardless, what's beautiful about Prizm is that it's not proprietary and thus while similar to Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight, it's open source.