These days more and more people, including yours truly, are spending time in Web apps. For myself, this includes the mighty GMail, Remember the Milk, and Google Docs. It really is nice to untie your documents from a single computer and have it accessible anywhere you go, including on the iPhone. Never again leaving work only to find out halfway home you forgot to copy That Important File to the flash drive is priceless.
So, Web apps are great. Although you STILL HAVE TO BACK UP. You don’t want to wake up one morning to find Google has deemed you persona non grata and you are now locked out from all your documents.
But there’s a psychological hurdle, at least for me. Having my task list sit as one tab among many in my browser makes it feel less … “real” is as good a way to put it as any. Plus, if the browser dies, there goes your document. Kaboom.
So it’s nice to make Web apps feel more like “real” apps. Which is the goal of a Site-Specific Browser (SSB). Basically, an SSB turns any Web site into an application with its own icon, its own place in your Dock or taskbar, and in some cases even badges showing you things like unread items in GMail.
Now how much would you pay for something like this? $19.95?
Just kidding. They’re free.
The two big players on the block—both in pre-1.0 versions at this writing even though both are plenty stable—are Prism from the same folks who brought you the Firefox browser, and Fluid.
Prism is cross-platform, while Fluid is Mac-only.
Either one will do you solid and elevate Web applications to first-rank status on your computer. Try ‘em out. You’ll thank me—and the developers who wrote them—the next time Flash nukes your browser from orbit.