Wait, What’s Fluid.app?

Fluid is a free Mac application that creates Site Specific Browsers (SSBs). An SSB allows you to run a single web site or application as a stand-alone Mac application, independent of your other web browser windows or tabs. This way, it is always instantly available via the Dock or application switcher, with no fumbling of tabs. Also, if your browser crashes, your important sites (in SSBs) are kept safe from harm.

What types of apps might you want to run in a SSB? How about your CRM, project management app, feed reader, email app, etc. Anything you use a LOT.

If you’re on Windows, Mozilla’s Prism creates SSBs, but the main highlights of this article are Fluid/Safari-only.

Setting It Up

When you fire up Fluid, you need to choose the URL (m.google.com) and the name of your application (I chose “Mobile Google”). You can then choose a custom application icon. Why do this? Otherwise it’ll go with the teenie little favicon the site uses. There are plenty of high resolution application icons on Flickr you can use that will look more like OS X icons.

Once you enter all that information, you can launch your new app.

Changing the User Agent

Hey wait, that didn’t look like the iPhone version! Nope. You’re still just looking at the generic mobile version non-iPhone users will get. Take a moment to think about how lucky you are that you have an iPhone.

Here’s how you change the user agent in Fluid so that it thinks it is an iPhone:

I’m going to guess that you need Safari’s “Develop” menu turned on in order to do this. You can do that via the “Advanced” pane in the Safari preferences.

Opening External Pages

While I don’t want to do any extraneous surfing from this new SSB, I also monitor things like the BatchBook support forums and our Summize searches in Google Reader. So, if I want to open something quickly to take action, I’d rather just do it right in my little SSB. So, I do this by setting this preference below:

And there you have it. You’ve got a handy little Google Reader (and Gmail/Calendar/Docs/etc.) widget on your desktop at all times. Enjoy!

GMail is Google’s web-based mail application. You probably have heard of this one. It uses the AJAX approach so that it behaves like a desktop application (not the click-refresh-click-refresh model that you’re used to). It also abandons the idea of filing your mail in folders. Instead, you send your old messages to your “Archive” which you can then search quickly using Google’s incredible searching technologies.

Google Maps is Google’s MapQuest killer. It is a mapping/driving directions site that feels like a desktop app, again thanks to AJAX. You’d guess that it’s Flash or something, but no… that’s Javascript, baby.

Google Calendar takes a GMail approach to calendar management. Not only will typing something like “meet with Jon at 9am tomorrow” automatically create the event correctly, you can also publish your calendars to collaboratively share (if you don’t mind your data being on Google’s servers).

Del.icio.us is just plain neat. I’ve never been a big bookmarking guy, always preferring to just type the addresses of where I want to go. However, in doing all this research, I’ve wanted to save a bunch of articles for later. Well, what better way to try out another Web 2.0 app? Del.icio.us stores your bookmarks so you can share them on different machines. Not only that, but when you save a bookmark, you can see how many others have bookmarked it. Then you can read each users’ comments about that link. You can also see what else users that linked to that page linked to (think Amazon’s “Those who purchased X, purchased Y and Z”).

To top it all off, users tag each link with whatever terms they want for easy categorization. This type of tagging, called “folksonomy” (as opposed to “taxonomy”), generates a more accurate way to sort through data since it actually reflects how users are using the content, not how the site admins think they will use it.

Flickr is another site that relies on “folksonomy”, this one an online storage site for photographs. Flickr, while I don’t actually use it, has a rabid following. Flickr has gone beyond just photo uploading. You can create user groups to share and discuss, subscribe to other users’ photo albums, and comment on each others’ collections (and more).

Digg is a site where users submit tech stories. When other users read it and like it, they can “digg it”, which is essentially giving it a thumbs up. Articles receiving a lot of diggs are ranked on the top page, but users can also search for other sites that users digg.

There are many more out there than these, but I just wanted to talk about a few right off the bat. Rest assured that I will provide more.