In the meantime, have a great week ahead!

Daniel, NTT, Farinelli and featuring Vincent

Stories this week:

[01:30] Windows 7 discussion with Vincent

[14:53] Software updates galore!

[22:00] Microsoft Zune to evolve into new “Pink” smartphone?

[25:14] Intel Core i7s “fly off shelves” here

[28:55] Starhub launches 3G femtocell service

[34:40] HTC Touch HD and HTC Touch 3G to be Starhub exclusive for a limited time

[39:00] Singtel launches Locator service

[43:25] Rednano launches location based search service for mobile phones

[46:00] Byte Of The Week: Remember the milk

Remember one of Chrome’s features is the ability to bookmark any webapp as a Chrome app, with it’s own icon and sandboxed window? Well Fluid does that, now, on a Mac, so we don’t have to wait for Chrome. What’s the big deal, you ask? Productivity! Features like Speed Dial [and variants] among others really cause users with pseudo-ADD [like me] to go into extended closed loops of surfing when all they originally wanted to do was check Gmail. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a browser window that lets you check mail, but nothing else? Yeah, thought so. Like a specialised widget, just fully functional?
Two birds with one stone definitely; gone are the times when laggy tabs in another page crash the entire browser in the process. I’m also pretty sure there is a RAM benefit that I’m unable to verify from my Activity Monitor; someone do the honours?

Of course you didn’t think that was the only benefit, did you? Think of all the reasons the only reason you put up with the bloat that Firefox has become, and that would be extensions. More specifically, one special extension called Greasemonkey, that allows you to load custom user javascripts for specific pages/domains/urls. Used in the context of webapps, like Gmail, these userscripts provide amazing possibilities like theming, integration with other services [like Gcal, Greader, Gnotebook etc] and even UI benefits. The webapps that you make with Fluid have Greasemonkey built in, so userscripts.org is at your disposal [conveniently from a icon in the menu bar itself.] Fluid itself runs on Webkit [everyone seems to adopting Webkit nowadays, good job Apple!], so I think some extensions that call on Firefox-specific APIs may not work. The good news here is most will.
Fluid also has extension support [not Firefox extensions but custom Webkit extensions] which could see customisability later in its lifetime.

So how does it work? Fire up Fluid, and it gives a popup form to fill up the url of the page you want to make into a webapp, the name you want to call the app, where you want the app to be saved and the icon for the app [by default it adopts the favicon of the webapp, but this may not please some people's aesthetics]. Enter all that in, and it generates a sandboxed app that works like Safari would, including tabbed browsing. The only difference is the conspicuous lack of an address bar [which is a GOOD THING].
It’s sandboxed in the sense that, once generated, it’s independent of the Fluid app, and also other webapps made by Fluid. This is important to note, because you can’t save Facebook [for example] userscripts in the Gmail app’s userscript folder and expect the Facebook app to comply.

I think it’s pretty sweet. What say you?

PS: Looking up the “creator” of Fluid yielded a link to his blog: http://www.ditchnet.org/wp/
Turns out the dude was an Apple Engineer working on Dashboard and Dashboard widgets so I think the Webclip similarity is no coincidence.