• Bloglines ships a fantastic new beta version with support for Fluid Dock badge “unread count” labels built right in! This beta version makes Bloglines a strong competitor to Google Reader.
• Michael Arrington welcomes TechCrunch guest-blogger Mathew Gertner (of AllPeers fame) who discusses Fluid, Mozilla Prism, and bridging Web and Desktop applications. Sounds like Mathew recently joined Mozilla to help develop Prism. Site Specific Browsers are gaining steam!
• Tabblo founder Antonio Rodriguez recently discovered Fluid, and gives his thoughts on rich internet browsers on his blog.
• Socialthing! posts a video on their blog of how to use Fluid with their mobile-optimized webapp to conveniently display your social network updates on your desktop.

This weekend, I was very fortunate to be asked make my first guest appearance on a Podcast, and what a way to start! The Citizen Garden Podcast, hosted by Larry Halff (of Ma.gnolia fame) and Chris Messina (of too much fame to bother listing) is a semi-regular discussion of the open web and social media.

I was joined by Jon Crosby, creator of Actiontastic in a discussion of Site-Specific Browsers, Fluid, Prism, WebKit, tools for cloud computing, and keeping open web technologies compelling in the face of powerful and interesting new proprietary web platforms.

I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Take a listen.

Ever tried the Web Inspector in Safari? Yeah, it’s great, huh? Well, guess what? If you’ve installed Safari 3.1, you can now use the Web Inspector with any Fluid-created SSB as well!! Here’s how.

Say, like me, you have a Fluid SSB for Backpack… which you’ve appropriately named “Backpack“.

1. Open Terminal.app.
2. Paste this:

   defaults write com.fluidapp.FluidInstance.Backpack WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

3. Type the return key.
4. Browse to any page in your Backpack SSB and right click any element on the page. You’ll see a Inspect this element menu item. Click it.

Boom. Web Inspector in Fluid. :0]

Fluid, CocoaHeads & Safari 3.1

News, news:

• Witness my triumphant return to Apple Campus as an indie Mac developer this Thursday night at 7:30pm. I’m giving a demo of Fluid at the Silicon Valley CocoaHeads meeting on Apple Campus in Cupertinostan. A big thanks to Scott Stevenson of Theocacao for the great opportunity to pimp Fluid!
• Today Apple Released Safari/WebKit 3.1 via Software Update with tons of new features and much improved JavaScript performance. Yes, Fluid gets all of these features absolutely free. One you’ve installed the new version of Safari, Fluid will have access to all of the new WebKit goodness as well.
• Some of the more interesting new features in WebKit 3.1:
  • Client-side Database Storage (aka SQLite, aka openDatabase())
  • Native document.getElementsByClassName()
  • Native CSS queries (aka document.querySelector("#foo .bar"))
  • WebFonts

socialthing! as a Fluid Plug-In? What?

Or SplitView:

And the Preference Pane:

Drosera is Apple’s very slick JavaScript debugger for WebKit based applications, and can be used with Fluid SSBs for debugging Userscripts. It just takes a little setup…

For Each Fluid SSB (or any WebKit-based app) that you’d like to be able attach the Drosera JS debugger to, you need to perform a single command-line incantation like this:

1. Download and install the latest WebKit nightly which includes a version of the Safari browser that runs against the latest WebKit build and also Drosera, the standalone JS debugger app.

2. Determine the bundle identifier for the Fluid SSB you’d like to debug… it will be com.fluidapp.FluidInstance.XXX where “XXX” is the name you gave your SSB. If there is whitespace in your SSB name besure to escape it with a back slash. for instance: com.fluidapp.FluidInstance.Google\ Reader

3. Launch your SSB.

4. Launch Drosera. You’ll see a “Fluid Instance” application in the “Attach” window’s application list. That’s your SSB. Select it in the list and click “Attach”.

5. Do something in your SSB that will execute your Userscript (navigate to a page, whatever). You’ll see Drosera is attached and now you can debug to your heart’s desire. Go on with your bad self.

Below is a quick digivid showing how the Fluid Plug-In API is coming along. This screencast shows some of the Fluid Plug-In features as well as a pre-release version of a Flickr Plug-In I’m working on using ImageKit and the open source ObjectiveFlickr framework by Lukhnos D. Liu.

The video was done in one take, and is a bit rushed, but I’m so busy pulling the Plug-In API together, that I’d rather post it than spend time trying to make something nice. I’ll do that after the API is shipped.

Here goes…

Damn… the MacBook’s fan kicks in about half way thru, and I have to start, like, yelling over it. “Are you sure it’s on??? IT’S WHISPER QUIET!!!”

I’ve been hard at work thru the weekend trying to get the Fluid Cocoa Plug-In API ready. Here’s just a teensy sneak peak of some of the features that are on the way…

The example here is a simple FriendFeed Plug-In I’ve worked up. As you can see Plug-Ins wil have a toolbar button item, and can appear in a split view below the main Browser content.

Plug-Ins also have a Preferences Pane for configuring settings or resetting defaults.

Plug-Ins can also appear in a Drawer.

or a floating panel.

Stay tuned, as I hope to have the Plug-In API available this weekend.

Everyone, I’ve setup a Google Group for Fluid:

http://groups.google.com/group/fluidapp

I hereby declare this Goolge Group page the place to make feature requests, report bugs, share tips and Userscript ideas, etc. Feel free to join and contribute. I’ll be updating the main Fluid website with some links tonight.

Also, thanks to the help of Jed Hurt, we now have a Google Code site up for maintaining a source code repository of Fluid Userscripts:

http://code.google.com/p/fluiduserscripts/

The repository is very early stages, but stay tuned for more updates soon.

As for me, I’m hard a work on a Plug-in API for Fluid which you’ll be hearing much more about soon… hopefully this weekend.

Over the weekend I linked to the Robby on Rails article showing how to setup a Campfire Userscript in Fluid.

I really should have noted that the excellent Campfire script is the result of a lot of hard work by Tim Harper. You can find Tim’s Campfire script on Userscripts.org.

Thanks Tim! Hopefully my little project can attract more developers like you and others who help make Fluid better for everyone!