Fluid App
Fluid App easily makes any website a regular Macintosh application
Fluid is a cool application that turns any website into its own Mac Application.
You can make Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and other websites into an App that can be put in the Dock. Now you can quickly get to the sites instead of having to open up a browser and then clicking on a bookmark.
This is also handy if you play Farmville or other web-based games. Now your just a click away from playing your game.
Simple Interface
Fluid user interface is pretty simple, just enter the URL and the application name. You then pick where to put the new App and if you have an icon you would like to use. If you don't have one, it will use the same icon that you see when you create bookmarks.
Safari Webkit
Each "application" uses Safari Webkit. So if your website is optimized for Firefox or Opera it may appear slightly different.
Here's an example user agent log entry. The initial requests show that it's from Fluid:
Fluid/206 CFNetwork/811.4.18 Darwin/16.5.0 (x86_64)
Any Clicks/Navigations shows that it's using Apple Web Kit:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_0) AppleWebKit/602.2.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0.1 Safari/602.2.14
Bonus Features
If you like Fluid functionality consider paying $4.99 to get some additional features.
- Create Fluid Apps with Separate Cookie Storage - Useful if you have multiple gmail accounts and don't want to log in each time.
- Pin Fluid Apps to the Mac OS X Status Bar - Now you can make Apps even easier to use.
- Use Userscripts or Userstyles in your Fluid Apps.
- Use Full Screen mode in your Fluid Apps.
Overall Thoughts
This is a pretty cool utility. I could think of some websites that I would want to use this application - especially for testing. For example, I have an App that opens an internal server to check a critical path that customers may take.
At first it feels weird to look at some websites without the browser location bar. It's a pretty cool tool to use for some websites.
Getting the Fluid.App
You can get the Fluid App from their website. You can use the basic features for free.