walkah

Google Gears for Safari == Offline SSBs!

2008-08-26T00:00:00-04:00

I'm really excited about today's (beta) release of google gears for safari. Why? because, as I've just tested, but enabling the plugin for safari it makes it available for all of my fluid app Site Specific Browsers (SSB's).

If you pay close attention here, you'll know that I'm a big fan of fluid and the idea of SSB's in general. I use apps for Remember the Milk (my current task management / GTD tool) and Google Reader extensively. Both of these sites support gears already for use offline (read: on airplanes). However, by using Fluid (based on Safari's webkit), I had to forgo gears/offline access. Thus, when traveling, I'd taken to opening a tab in firefox for each of those sites (if I remembered, and as long as I didn't need to otherwise restart firefox, etc).

Well, I just had a wonderful experience. I downloaded gears for safari, installed it... and instantly all of my fluid instances were gears enabled. Love it!

FluidApp, Menu Extra and iPhone sites

2008-05-28T00:00:00-04:00

My love affair with Fluid.app continues. The latest release (0.9.1.4) includes support for running your SSB as a Menu Extra (i.e. something in the OS X (check out the video).

As shown in the video, I think the best use for this new feature is in conjunction with iPhone sites. In the video, Tod shows creating an app for http://i.brightkite.com/. I've been using this to check-in on BrightKite. It's nice, unobtrusive and easy in lieu of BrightKite's own, native desktop apps.

My other favorite (pictured) is http://i.rememberthemilk.com/. Remember the Milk's iPhone app has a nice feature that the "Today" tasks list also shows overdue tasks (which I haven't figured out how to do in the standard web app).

More and more of my webapp usage is moving to fluid these days. I can't say enough good things about this app. And google gears support is coming!!

Fluid: Desktop Web Apps

2008-02-27T00:00:00-05:00

Matt turned me on to a new app for OS X (Leopard only) called Fluid. Essentially, fluid lets you create website-specific applications - really just little webkit browsers as their own applications with their own icons. It's really simple to use and (so far) has worked phenomenally well.

I have two web apps that have become an absolute core staple of my daily routine: Remember the Milk (for TODO management) and Google Reader (for RSS feeds). Both of these are pretty "heavy" web apps (containing lots of JS/AJAX/etc) and I had been running Firefox extensions for both which ultimately weighed down my main browser (which is where I do primary development, etc). Having them as separate applications lets me keep Firefox running (a little) leaner, and I also get pretty icons and the ability to "cmd-tab" between them.

The coolest part, however, is that Fluid has implemented icon updating on a few sites (google reader being one of them) to show the number of unread items. Check it:

Now, if I can just get Google Gears for Webkit working (for offline support for google reader & RTM) I'll be one happy camper.

The desktop / web app convergence continues...