Do you ever feel that your computer treats your favourite web-applications like second class citizens compared to desktop software? Sure, Gmail is slick, but it doesn’t get to sit in your Mac’s Dock and show you how many unread messages you have. You probably check your Facebook Newsfeed far more than you change your screen resolution, but Display Settings gets a permanent spot at the top of your screen while Facebook is three clicks away. A funky little application called Fluid can help elevate any web-app to first-class status on your Mac.

Fluid allows you to create an application that lives in your Dock or Menu Bar out of any website or web-app. These applications are cleaner and simpler than a typical instance of a web browser. A Fluid app has no address bar, or back and forward buttons, letting you forget you are using a website at all. Gmail users will appreciate the fact that Fluid shows your unread message count in a badge on the dock icon, just like Apple’s native mail application. It even automatically creates an attractive icon out of the site’s favicon. iPhone users will be familiar with the concept of Fluid, since it has been a feature in the iPhone OS for over a year.

As more and more desktop applications become replaced by web-apps, Fluid will only become more useful. Fluid helps make these rich web-apps more stable by having each of them run in their own process. If the flash game you are playing crashes, you don’t have to worry about losing your half-written Facebook message (or Basecamp update – we know you work hard too), because each Fluid app is totally independent. Fluid runs as a native Cocoa app in Mac OS 10.5 and uses the Webkit engine (the same one that sits under the hood in Safari 3), so it is fast and reliable.

Best of all, Fluid is completely free. You can thank Todd Ditchendorf on his blog or via Twitter for this fantastic app, or just directly download it here.

A web-app filled dock, thanks to Fluid

Tags: free, mac, Software, web-apps

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 3:00 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.