Fluid Blog

Check out my screencast preview of the soon-to-be-released Tabs Plug-in.

• Red-hot Git repository hosting site, github, has added Fluid support via the Fluid JavaScript API for dock menu items, a tutorial on how to use the Thumbnail Plug-in for coverflow browsing of past commits, and a snazzy new Fluid icon.

• Um… WOW. The oh-so-stylish gang over at Fling Media (whom you might remember for their neato iPhone web apps Leaflets) have developed a CSS Stylesheet for Fluid Google Reader SSBs that mimics the UI of the popular Mac news reader NewsFire. The stylesheet makes Google Reader look fantastic in Fluid. Also, using Fluid’s Userscripting support, the stylesheet is a simple one-click install! Great job Brian! Be sure to check this out.

  

• Popular web-based mobile Twitter client, Hahlo, seems to have discovered Fluid.

• Travis Jeffery of MacTips.org gives a great overview of Fluid’s functions and features.

Howdy, Fluid 0.9 is now available from the site and thru software update.

As always, the changelog has all the details.

The biggest improvements are:

• Session Restore: an option (on by default) to reinstate all open tabs and windows from your previous browsing session on launch. Windows will be created in the same locations onscreen and with the same sizes and open tabs. Look in General Preference Pane.
• Gmail / Google Reader empty window of death fix: you know that annoying empty window that pops up in Gmail and Google Reader when you click a link to a site that opens in your default system browser? Of course you do! Should be fixed in each now.
• Open link in default browser in background: option to have the system browser open links sent by Fluid SSBs in the background (off by default). Look in General Preference Pane.
• Yubnub support: the search box now supports yubnub (social web-based command line) searches too. Check it out at http://yubnub.com.
• XPath expression support in Thumbnail Plug-in: Use XPath expressions rather than CSS selectors to select thumbnail content. Just prefix the expression with: “xpath:”.

Fluid user Colin Sproule posts a totally badass screencast (using my favorite screencasting app, ScreenFlow) showing how to setup the Fluid Thumbnail Plug-in with Muxtape, the hottest music sharing site on the web.

Help me Digg it below!

Muxtape: social webapp for sharing music playlists. Fluid: Mac desktop app for creating site-specific browsers with coverflow browsing.

Put em together, and here’s what you get. Hawt!

read more | digg story

Fluid 0.8.9 is out with the new Fluid Thumbnail Plug-in bundled.

Rather than try to explain it… just watch.

• Mathew Gertner of Mozilla returns as guest blogger for TechCrunch and further discusses Fluid, Prism, Bubbles, Air and Bridging Desktop and Web Applications.

• Jeremy Johnstone of the Yahoo! Messenger team posts a Userscript, screencast, and tutorial on how to use Fluid with Yahoo’s web-based Messenger app. Looks like Jeremy also uses my preferred screencast app, Screenflow.

• RailsJedi explains how to setup a Fluid SSB for browsing the Ruby on Rails documentation via NoobKit and RailsBrain. Oh… and I can tell by the screenshots, that jacques is a fellow fan of the amazing image-sharing/image-annotating app/site Skitch.

• The folks from the popular, super-sexy Git-hosting website GitHub post a very cool Icon for use with a Fluid/GitHub SSB.

Fluid 0.8.8 is out with a few bug fixes/small improvements. This release improves support for Gmail and Google Apps for your Domain SSBs and also
improves support for VoiceOver with Fluid SSBs (although there’s still more work to be done in that deptartment).

Important note: if you were experiencing any weirdness in your Gmail or GAFYD SSBs since the 0.8.7 release yesterday, in order to get the fixes from this update you must:

1. Delete your old Gmail or GAFYD SSB.
2. Delete the prefs for that SSB. Something like: ~/Library/Preferences/com.fluidapp.FluidIstance.<what-you-named-your-ssb>.plist
3. Install 0.8.8.
4. Recreate your Gmail or GAFYD SSB with 0.8.8.

A big thanks to Jamie Kahn Genet for his wonderful help improving GAFYD support in Fluid.

Fluid 0.8.7 is out, with two major features:

1. URL Whitelists and Blacklists for allowing/disallowing browsing to matched URL patterns.
2. Custom User-Agent strings. Choose from popular presets, our provide your own.

The whitelist feature is located in the Preference Window under the “Advanced” pane, while the User-Agent feature is located in each SSB’s Application menu in the main menu.

The whitelist feature is actually really huge for Fluid. This allows so much more flexibility in making SSBs “just work” out of the box, as well as offering the “pro” user tons of power in specifying what webapps she wants her SSB to handle.

How do whitelists work? Fluid SSBs are targeted browsers that only browse the “home website” you provide when you create them. Previously, Fluid would just take a gander at the “Home URL” you provided for your SSB, and try to make educated guesses about what subsequent URLs were part of the same URL domain or broader website/webapp. If you browse to a page that is outside this URL domain or website, Fluid kicks you out to the system default web browser. However, It’s inevitable that Fluid will occasionally be wrong when guessing.

Whitelists allow me to add more special cases out of the box for more websites more easily. But more importantly, the give the end user the power to fix any problem they encounter, and let their SSB know exactly what they consider part of their webapp.

With 0.8.6, I’ve finally released the Cocoa Plug-in API for Fluid! Unfortunately, I’ve only released one very simple Plug-in for now: the Clipboard Plug-in. I doubt anyone will be blown away by this particular Plug-in… but the other Plug-in I’m working on has been holding me up for weeks now, so I figured it’s better to just get the API out there.

However, I’m hoping the Clipboard Plug-in will get developers excited about the possibilities when developing Cocoa UI plug-ins for a WebKit-based browser/SSB. The really great thing about Fluid’s Plug-in API is that your plug-in can appear in multiple places in the UI. As the developer, you get to decide which places are allowed for your plug-in, and the user can choose her preferrred placement from the allowed placements in the Preferences window.

To help devs along, I’ve released the source code to the Clipboard Plug-in as an example.

Also in this release is lots of JavaScript API for Userscripters. See the changelog below.

• FluidInstance.app: Plug-In API!
• FluidInstance.app: Clipboard Plug-In.
• FluidInstance.app: “Photo Browser” added for iPhoto-like image browsing. Main Menu -> View -> Photo Browser (control-option-command-b)
• FluidInstance.app: Preference to “Open new links from other Applications” in new tab or new window.
• FluidInstance.app: “Create TinyURL” from context menu when you right click a link.
• FluidInstance.app: “New Userscript” menu item creates a new Userscript template, places it in this SSB’s Userscripts dir, activates it, and opens it in your default text editor.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.dockBadge = “foo” - The dockBadge feature is now exposed as a read/write property of the fluid object, rather than a method. The method is deprecated, but will probably remain.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.hide() - Hide this SSB application. Available only to local Userscripts.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.unhide() - Unhide this SSB application. Available only to local Userscripts.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.activate() - Bring this SSB application to the front. Available only to local Userscripts.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.terminate() - Quit this SSB application. Available only to local Userscripts.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.include(pathStr) - Eval a local JavaScript file located at the given path. Available only to local Userscripts.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.applicationPath - a string path to this SSB’s .app bundle directory (“/path/to/MySSB.app/”). Available only to local Userscripts.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.resourcePath - a string path to this SSB’s Resources directory (“/path/to/MySSB.app/Contents/Resources/”). Available only to local Userscripts.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.userscriptPath - a string path to this SSB’s Userscripts (“/Users/Mandy/Library/Application\ Support/Fluid/SSB/Campfire/Userscripts”) directory. Available only to local Userscripts.
• FluidInstance.app: JS API: fluid.log(obj) - This method is now only available from Userscripts.

• Erik Michaels-Ober of community Q&A site Fluther
  posts a wicked-cool Dock Icon for use with Fluid. Thanks to the Fluther guys for the shoutout! And everyone check out Fluther… it’s kinda like Yahoo! Answers… only infinitely better. And prettier too.
• Last week, break-out webapp Muxtape became all the rage. It’s an insanely simple, yet elegant way to create music playlists and share them with friends. Totally rad. Anyhow, looks like the folks at Muxtape are Fluid fans. What’s especially cool about this is that Peter of Muxtape is using Fluid + Airfoil (I recently purchased a license) to wirelessly pipe audio from the Muxtape webapp thru Airtunes.
• Richard Roberts of the yet-to-be-released “data wiki”, Swirrl, blogs about how the Swirrl team is using Fluid with 37Signal’s Campfire web-based chat app.