Fluid application changes the way you work with web apps

I just downloaded and started using Fluid.  This application lets you wrap your web applications into a Cocoa desktop application also known as an  SSB (site-specific browser). This is cool for a number of reasons but most importantly your workflow.  I have been wanting something like this for a while now because I find there are a number of web apps I lose between the dozen or so tabs I have open at any one time.  Since they are tabs which could be in one of many open windows it is easy for them to get lost.  They just aren’t handled like system-level applications.  So the introduction of Fluid changes all of that.  You can Command-Tab between your web apps, keep them in your Dock, and apparently there is support for 1Password as well.

I think the description on their site sums up the way this works pretty well.

…Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your WebApp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many, manyother goodies.

Fluid includes Tabbed Browsing, built-in Userscripting (aka Greasemonkey), URL pattern matching for browsing whitelists and blacklists, bookmarks, auto-software updates via the Sparkle Update framework, custom SSB icons, a JavaScript API for showing Dock badges, Growl notifications, and Dock menu items, and more.

One thing you will likely have to contend with (and has been driving me nuts) is how to get a decent icon for your Dock.  The application gives you the option to use the one on the site (the favicon) or to define your own (something on your hard drive).  I haven’t had any luck really with the icon from site option so I opted to create my own.  Now what you can do is grab the favicon (if it’s a decent one) then head over to iConvertIcons.  Using their free wizard you can quickly convert any image or the favicon.ico file into a Mac-friendly icns file.  Once you have done this and saved the output to your system you can then create a new Fluid application and point to your new icon.  It took me a few tries to get some of the more difficult ones to work, but in the end it is well worth it.

You can also use any icons you may already have on your system if you prefer that route.   Give it a shot, I think this is a keeper for me.

Update:  Check out these icons on this Flickr group

2 comments

  1. After I press delete, the error comes up and says that I will need peiiossrmn from the administrator and I press continue since I’m the only user on this computer and it is set as an administrator. And then another error pops up saying You require peiiossrmn from Sam-PC\Sam to make changes to this folder and I have two options to either Try Again and the same message keeps popping back up or cancel. So I press cancel to get out and try again but same message keeps coming back up.

Leave a comment