Fluid Nightly with Google Gears
Update: I’ve removed the Fluid Nightly for now. See my latest post for details.
After a bit of tinkering, I’ve managed to bake the Google Gears code directly into Fluid SSBs. (No SIMBL plugins required!)
I haven’t tested this much yet, but the functionality seems to be there. For now I’m providing a preview (or ‘Nightly’) build for adventurous souls. Download the Fluid 0.9.1.5 preview with Gears support baked in:
Download Fluid Nightly with Google Gears (6.8MB)
Note that the normal download on the Fluid website does not include Gears support yet. Only the Nightly linked here has it.
Also, if you’re attending Google I/O tomorrow or Thursday, please spread the word!
May 28th, 2008 at 03:12 am
[...] fluid és google gears! http://fluidapp.com/blog/2008/05/28/fluid-nightly-with-google-gears « előző | Benke Zsolt — 2008. 05. 28. [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 06:05 am
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
May 28th, 2008 at 09:33 am
This is the best feature ever! Let’s hope more webapps incorporate Google Gears support now.
May 28th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
On which webapp can this feature be tested?
Thanks in advance
May 28th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Hi all. Some updates on this feature:
I’ve tried the Fluid Nightly on some Gears-enabled apps from Google, specifically Google Docs and Google Reader. Unfortunately, Gears support in WebKit for these two apps is broken, and hangs on the install sheet.
Unfortunately, it looks like the Gears folks have not yet made Gears work with WebKit properly. This is not all that surprising for several reasons:
1. The Safari browser does not have a supported (non-hackish) plug-in API for browser extensions like FireFox has (called Addons these days). So there’s really no way to install Gears for WebKit without using an InputManager hack anyhow.
2. As you may notice, Google does not provide an easy Gears installer for Safari or any other WebKit-based browser. To ‘install’ Gears for Safari, you have to checkout the Gears code from the repository, dig around, and build it yourself (like I did) and run some scripts to install an InputManager. Obviously, this is far from an endorsement that Gears is tested & ‘working’ against WebKit.
So my sense is that there has been *some* work in the Gears community to get Gears working with WebKit, but not a great deal. Currently Gears is just not compatible with WebKit :0[
The great news is that Gears is open source and any of us (including yours truly) is welcome to jump in and make things better! This is something I will definitely consider doing in coming weeks.
In the meantime, it appears that all of the Gears JavaScript APIs are available in the Fluid Nightly. So… if you are a developer, you can jump in and start writing JavaScript code and start testing!
ALSO… note that if you are a ObjC/C++ hacker you can download the Gears source code, and begin making changes to try to add WebKit support to Gears. Then, you can build the Gears.plugin bundle and place it into the Fluid Nightly app bundle to test your changes to Gears. Place the plugin here:
MyFluidSSB.app/Contents/PlugIns/
Note that the current Fluid nightly is running Gears as a normal Cocoa loadable bundle or ‘plugin’, but it does not use or require InputManagers or SIMBL trickery of any kind. It’s just a normal Cocoa bundle.
Thanks all!
May 28th, 2008 at 13:31 pm
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May 29th, 2008 at 14:59 pm
That’s great that Gears is loaded as a plugin. Can I persuade you to keep it optional? I can see it being desirable to create SSBs without Gears to help isolate inter-worker sync issues.
July 1st, 2008 at 14:03 pm
… what is the latest status on the gears support?