Jan
22
Are you a Gmail, Basecamp, Flickr or Facebook 20 times a day? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random Flash ad crashing your browser and causing you to lose your (say) Google Spreadsheets data in another tab? Then I got great news for ya!
Meet Fluid, your next favorite Mac Application. This great little (free) app will let you wrap each of your favorite webapp in it’s own separated window, just as if you were running an independent Application.
To me the advantages of this are numerous, just to name a few:
Fluid also comes with a bunch of neat features like tabbed browsing, color badges to display unread items (a la Mail App) or even customized PNG App Icon (or if you automatic URL favicon discovering) which you can later drag it to the Dock.
After testing it myself with Gmail I can say it works just as Mailplane. Below it’s a quick tutorial on how you can start enjoying this great app today.
You can grab it from here.
After unzipping the file, drag it to your Applications folder.
In order to create your Site Specific Browsers you need to type the URL right on first field. For this tutorial we’ll be using:
Then, choose a name for the Website, in this case:
Set the location where you want Fluid to create the App Icon. I chose to leave it on the default Applications folder.
Then select whether you would like to use a custom PNG for the App, or let Fluid import the Favicon from the URL provided above.
In this case I’ve set up a Ten Thousand Things PNG Icon to use with Fluid. You can grab it here.
Final step, click on Create. After a few second you’ll be represented with a pop up telling you your Desktop Application was successfully created.
Now go grab your new App and drag it to your Dock and voilá!
One other cool thing about Fluid is that it has it’s own Flickr Group where people share icons of known webapps that you can use freely. I took the liberty to download 3 of them and place it here to save you some time.
Enjoy!
