FluidApp is what’s called a Single Site Browser and is a great way to pull key websites you use throughout the day out of your primary browser and onto your Mac dashboard as standalone applications. It’s super easy for anyone to use. The service has a thriving community of users – I have 10 Fluid browsers running on my computer right now and wouldn’t want to work without them. In fact, I’m writing this blog post from Movable Type inside a Fluid Browser.
In a quiet mid-December move, FluidApp developer Todd Ditchendorf put “most of the code behind Fluid” up on Github under an open source license. That’s very good news – new developments are already coming fast and furious. If you haven’t checked out Fluid before, now is a great time.
There’s something magical about the way single site browsers let you use different web apps. They don’t get lost in tabs. They don’t fall prey to browser crashes. You can put a handsome icon in your doc to jump over to them.
Windows users looking for a similar experience should check out Bubbles or Mozilla’s Prism.
Now that Fluid for the Mac is open source though, it will be very exciting to see what features are added next. Creator Ditchendorf says he has some more exciting plans under his hat but nothing to show off yet. Watch this space.
What’s your favorite Fluid App? One of my favorites is LazyFeed.