Fluid - Free Site Specific Browser for Mac OS X Leopard

What Is Fluid?

Fluid is an awesome relatively new app that is leading the way for SSBs (Site Specific Browsers.) Site Specific Browsers are (name makes it obvious) web browsers that are designed to interact exclusively with a single web site. When you do this you can also build in more functionality for that site than a general browser can.

Who/When Is Fluid Useful For?

Fluid (and other SSBs) is absolutely wonderful for the ever increasing number of web apps, sites like Digg, Base Camp, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, GMail and so forth. That does leave a big chunk out of our typical web browsing sessions (after all it is called web browsing/surfing), however when you click onto a link that leaves that specific site (whatever it may be) Fluid knows to leave it to your default web browser. For example if you had a specific Fluid browser for Digg and while in it you clicked a link to a YouTube video, Safari (or whatever default browser you have) would open to that site. One example of what a SSBs like Fluid can provide that a typical browser can’t is when used with Google Reader it shows how many unread articles you have (similar to what NetNewsWire does), or when used with Facebook it will show you how many unread messages you have.

Plug-ins

Through Plug-ins Fluid can utilize the tools OS X provides, there are two Plug-ins installed by default; the Thumbnail and Clipboard. To use them either click on the top right button to open up the menu bar and click on which one you’d like to use or press Command-Option-Command-C for the Clipboard, and Command-Option-Command-T for the Thumbnail Plug-in. The Thumbnail Plug-in is without a doubt one of the coolest and most functional implementations of Coverflow. Let’s say I have an app for Digg and I open the Thumbnail Plug-in up, it goes through each link and image and lines them up for me to view and navigate through. Or if Coverflow isn’t your cup of tea you can use the included grid format. The Clipboard Plug-in does exactly what you’d think it would do, open it up and then you simply drag links, text, or video and so forth onto it for future use.

This is what I’m talking about (click for bigger version.)

How Do I Use Fluid?

Here’s a screencast on how Fluid works. Basically you use the actual Fluid.app as a hub/generator for all your other SSBs. So fire up Fluid.app and input the URL of the site you want the app to be for, the name of it, the location and whether you want the icon to be the Website’s Favicon or your own. And that’s it! Now you have made your own Browser for that Specific Site.

I recommend using your own picture for the icon as the Favicon tends to be a small image and gets pixalated when it tries to get to the regular application icon size. Thankfully, there is a Flickr group dedicated to Fluid icons that look great.

Developers, Developers, Developers!

Fluid is also very developer friendly, it features a Cocoa Plug-in API, Bookmarklet support, GreaseKit scripting built-in, JavaScript Drag and Drop API like all WebKit browsers, and also Fluid’s own JavaScript API with some additional functionality.

Where Can I Get It?

Todd Ditchendorf is working on Fluid like crazy and it is updated very frequently, check it out at it’s own site, here.

Other Resources and Articles on Fluid

• TechCrunch in December, March, and April.
• Lifehacker
• 37Signals
• 43 Folders
• Daring Fireball
• Wired
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog
• ReadWriteWeb
• Lifestreaming webapp Socialthing!
• Community Q&A site Fluther

Note: 1Password also has Fluid support. To use it you need to be running at least 1Password version 2.6.BETA-2 and then run this command: sudo rm -R /Library/InputManagers/1PasswdIM and then restart 1Password.