Tag Archive for ‘prism’ at Josh Kim dot Org

Basically it boils down to: Don’t use Prism. Yet. It crashes quite often, and not in the way you’d probably want it to crash: It just eats away at your processor until you realize that while you were listening to music on your headphones that the fans were going insane and the processor was running at 81 degrees. Celsius.

The OMFG screenshot came into being while I was testing out some Fluid Applications (The last three applications were Fluid Applications). It’s been a while since I used it, but it looks like it’s getting better and better. A lot of great things in the horizon… but it’s too bad it isn’t open sourced (See Post Here). I’d love to start messing around with the guts…

More about Fluid

But anyway, it looks great, and feels even better. I love being able to command+tab into a web application. Not only that, I can even see some statuses on the desktop icon itself.

But of course, the nerdy neat freak in me decided to figure things out over lunch and see if there was a way to change the icons to look a bit better. I don’t really thing a 16×16 pixel icon would do in an Apple environment… After poking at flickr a bit, I found these two lovely icons.

Gmail Icon at Flickr: Direct Link

Facebook Icon at Flickr: Direct Link

These are actual .icns files, rather than just images. Thanks to autodafe0728, I was able to make two of my most accessed Fluid app’s icon amazing.

How do you actually use these .icns files? Well, you have to pick an icon when you create your Fluid app, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to change it after you’ve created it. So if you already have one, delete it, and just remake this new one after setting the “Icon: ” field to the .icns file rather than the default “Use Website Favicon”.

Enjoy. More on this web application vs. desktop application business later.

This post is like a month overdue. Bear with me, because it’s still relevant.

I had started to hate Firefox 2 (on the Mac) a few months back. It was getting bloated and very unstable with multiple tabs open. While I still use it for web development (Web Developer, FireBug with YSlow, Aardvark, etc…), I made the switch to Camino after a friend gave me a tour of the shortcut keys it had.

Sidenote: Yes… Opera… I’ve probably used you every time a new version came out, but for some reason, I can never stay with you. Maybe it’s because you’re so perfect, so far from the competition…

Camino is definitely a lot more fast, robust, and responsive, and so it has become my browser of choice. Who knows if Opera or Safari will ever take its place… Of course, very recently, I’ve started to use the Firefox 3 Beta 2 exclusively, with Safari and Camino running in the background (another post all on its own as to why I do this).

Enter Prism (formerly known as WebRunner)

To be honest, I have web apps that I have “running” constantly. In other words, I have webpages open in tabs, or access them frequently over the course of the day. I have these sites be the shortcuts on the bookmark bar in Safari. That way, I can quickly access them with command + number. Command + 1 = Gmail. Command + 2 = Google Reader. Command + 3 Facebook… so on and so forth.

I was very excited to hear about WebRunner, and went and tried it out. Now called Prism, it basically does these things:

Separate process: When the webapp goes down or locks up, I donâ€™t want anything else affected. Thankfully, Firefox does have session restore, but that is beside the point. When I open many tabs and have several webapps running in a browser, things get slow and unstable after a day or two.

Minimal UI: A generic browser UI is not needed for webapps. If any UI is present, make it specific to the webapp I am using.

Basic desktop integration: Create shortcuts to start the webapp, add ability to show specialized icons in the tray or dock and ability to display notifications.

Platform with extensions: I donâ€™t want to download a full browser runtime for each webapp. I do want to be able to add some custom code/features that are not directly supported in the webapp. I should be able to install one runtime and then get packages or extensions for each webapp. Think Firefox extensions or Greasemonkey scripts. These extensions should be able to tweak the SSB UI as well.

Open external links in real browser: If I click a link in the webapp that opens a new site, donâ€™t change my webapp browser window. Open all external links in my default/real browser.

In summary, it’s a very streamlined (I mean streamlined) browser, meant to do one thing: serve up a web application. Currently, what’s bothering me is that I’m only able to run a single instance of Prism, and only a single web app at a time.

For now, I’m just going to have it open to Gmail all the time. This way, I can command+tab into my email client. Gone are the days of opening a browser and typing command + 1 or typing gmail.com in Quicksilver. Wee!

What’s the Point?

I hear you. What’s all of this hype for? So I get a crappier browser that does less. However, I feel like bridging that gap between the web apps, only accessible by typing out an address or clicking/shortcut keying into a browser window, and desktop apps, accessible by command + tab or running the application by double clicking on an icon (or single-click on the Dock), is going to be very important in the future. This takes a web application and gives it it’s own container (its own separate process), which makes it behave a lot more like a desktop application.

Josh Kim dot Org