More and more of what we do these days is via the web,from Google Mail to Salesforce there are apps for pretty much any task. Living in the browser is fine but I tend to have a lot of tabs open and sometimes it is nice to just launch an app for a specific task. Now thanks to a small OS X app called Fluid any web page or app can be packaged into an OS X app.
The software is available for free and is extremely easy to get going. When launched you get the following dialog box;
As you can see,it couldn’t be simpler,just enter the web address and the name that you want to appear in the dock and click create. The software uses webkit so the sites will look and work as they would in Safari.
As a silly example,here’s this blog running as an app,note the lightbulb icon in the dock which it has taken from the favicon.
Of course a more practical example would be running something like Google Apps as it’s own application.
Fluid is completely free but for the massive sum of $4.99 you can buy it and get a couple of neat extra features. Perhaps the most important is the ability to have application specific cookies rather than using the Safari shared model. This allows you to create apps for the same service with different user accounts and run them side by side –again Google Apps is a great example of this. As standard Google uses cookies to know which users account to present and doesn’t allow two simultaneous accounts in the same browser,with Fluid I have created separate apps for my different user accounts and can run them at the same time. One of the other features in the payed version is OS X Lion full screen support which works really well.
