Fluid Blog

Fluid 0.8 is available for download.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this release soon… but it’s late tonight, so I’m curling up with some wine and my book. The biggies in this release are optional Bookmarks including bookmark bar UI (useful for your Bookmarklets), and built-in Userscripting (think Greasemonkey) provided by the open source GreaseKit project. Both Bookmarklets and Userscripts are important extension points for Site-Specific Browsers.

The next step is to work on a Fluid user community site where we can share Userscripts, request features, and report bugs. More on this soon.

Also, please note that before version 1.0, all site-specific behaviors (Dock badges, Dock menu items, etc.) will be moving to Userscripts using the JS API provided in 0.7 and 0.8. I’d like to ask you all for help in developing robust Userscripts for your favorite webapps… specifically providing Dock badge support. Soon, I’ll have a solution available for sharing these. I really like the way the TextMate user community has developed and shared Bundles. I’d really like to get that kind of activity going around Fluid Userscripts. Suggestions welcome.

There’s one new JS API function available in 0.8:

I think that’s pretty self explanatory…

Below are the notes from the 0.8 Changelog:

• Fluid.app: Fluid now tries to fetch a site’s “apple-touch-icon” before trying to fetch its favicon.
• Fluid.app: Fluid offers to overwrite any existing application with the same name and location as the new app you’re creating.
• FluidInstance.app: Bookmarks Manager/Menu/Bar.
• FluidInstance.app: Integrated Userscript support (think Greasemonkey) provided by GreaseKit.
• FluidInstance.app: Block PopUps menu item/keyboard command just like Safari.
• FluidInstance.app: Resizable Search Field in browser toolbar.
• FluidInstance.app: “Create TinyURL for this page” menu item/keyboard command added. The TinyURL is placed on the system clipboard and a Growl Notification is shown.
• FluidInstance.app: More JavaScript API: Add Dock menu items from JavaScript for your SSB. fluid.addDockMenuItem(title, callback)
• FluidInstance.app: Toggle the visibility of a browser window status bar (bottom of the window).
• FluidInstance.app: Toggle the visibility of a browser window tab bar when there’s only one tab open.
• FluidInstance.app: Make Text Standard size (command-0). (returns text to normal size after increasing or decreasing.)
• FluidInstance.app: Improved address bar autocompletion: semi-transparent popup suggestions list now appears automatically.
• FluidInstance.app: Continuous Spell-Checking (red dotted line) enabled for text fields and text areas.
• FluidInstance.app: Frontmost WebView has keyboard focus immediately after entering fullscreen mode.
• FluidInstance.app: Improved address field progress bar rendering.

Just a heads up to Fluid user community… The next version of Fluid is almost ready for release with lots of new goodies including Bookmarks (hidden by default), resizable search box, “apple-touch-icon” support, auto spell checking, TinyURL support, more JavaScript APIs, hideable status bar, and integrated Userscripting (greasekit/monkey). I just need to do some testing of userscripting. If anyone wants to help beta test the userscripting feature, let me know by email or comment and I’ll hook you up within a day or two.

I’m dedicated to adding a few more important features like blacklists/whitelists and session restore on my way to a 1.0 release, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I’m looking for a solution for an online community/issue tracker/wiki for the Fluid user base… I’d prefer something open source that I can host myself, but I’m open to pretty much any ideas, including 3rd party solutions. If I have to host it myself, a tool based on PHP/MySQL is pretty much required… as that’s all I’ve got from my hosting provider. Any recommendations?