37signals logo

This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.

Jobs:

Fluid: Wrap your favorite web apps in their own browser David Jan 17

38 comments Latest by Roger Wilco

With Fluid you can give your favorite web apps their own contained Safari-powered space on OS X. Once wrapped, the applications get their own icon, their own place in the Dock, and their own lifeline, so crashing your general purpose browser won’t take down your Fluid apps.

It’s neat and free. Check it out.

(If you’re not on OS X, Prism does something similar for Windows and Linux powered by the Mozilla engine).

Update: Here are high res logos for Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and Highrise to use with Fluid. (Click to download).

Looking for a job? Got a position to fill? Check out the Job Board.
Over 1 million people use 37signals' simple web-based software to collaborate on projects, track contacts, and organize their business with an intranet.

38 comments so far

Erik Mallinson 17 Jan 08

How about some higher resolution 37signals logos for our Fluid apps? The Favicon it uses is ugly.

Ben Atkin 17 Jan 08

I’ve been using Prism for a couple of weeks now. I have three apps up all the time while I’m at work—Todoist, GMail, and Campfire. After installing it, my browser crashes much less frequently.

Also, note that Fluid requires Leopard, so people who are still on Tiger might want to check out Prism as well.

Morgan Roderick 17 Jan 08

http://www.flickr.com/groups/fluid_icons/

List all versions will get you the nice PNG version, you need for nice use in dock.

Ryan Pratt 17 Jan 08

Erik, you can find the Icons hear for 37 apps.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/fluid_icons/pool/

I have been using Fluid for 3 weeks now and it is veery promising.

Yaphi 17 Jan 08

How do they go about using the badges? Can I get badges of my Campfire chats? or Basecamp todos?

SS 17 Jan 08

Yaphi, we’ve been in contact with the Fluid author regarding badges for our apps, and he’s expressed interest in adding a badge API in the next version.

Jemaleddin 17 Jan 08

It should just use the same file the iPhone uses for its web clips.

I used Fluid when it was first announced and had nothing but problems. When it was running, Finder wouldn’t shut down which would bork the new software update in Leopard that logs you out before installing. I dealt with it for a few days before killing Fluid and presto! everything is working again.

Morgan Roderick 17 Jan 08

Oh, I forgot to mention.

Once you’ve created your fluid app for your favourite 37s app, you can just send it as an attachment to your teammates … and suddenly your whole team is liquidized :)

Lars Fischer 17 Jan 08

Fluid does not work with Highrise when using OpenID.

August Lilleaas 17 Jan 08

Looks hawt! I wonder how it works with quicksilver, though. I’d rather not have to click things in the doc, that’s so 2006.

Matt Radel 17 Jan 08

This is really cool. The updated Gmail has been crashing FF mac like a mo’ fo’ recently, so this will help my sanity by creating a SSB for it.

Tim Stringer 17 Jan 08

I’ve been using Basecamp through Fluid for about a month now and am very happy with this solution. It’s already a great piece of software and it gets even better with each release.

No more accidently closing down the Basecamp windows in Safari, and the ability to go to full screen mode is a real bonus. I’ve had some communications with the author and have found him to be very responsive.

Emil 17 Jan 08

Hmm.. Anyone got this app working with Writeboards? As a part of Basecamp. It asks for a password when trying to access them via Fluid BC.

Frank 17 Jan 08

I wonder if the day will ever come for 37signals to become successfully enough for Nike to use them over Trademark infringement for using the Nike Swoosh in the Basecamp logo.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/images/basecamp-logo-for-fluid.png

Kendall 17 Jan 08

Can you guys put icons on your apps for iPhone web clips? right now it’s just a non-descript screen shot.

Jason Falk 17 Jan 08

I have been using fluid for a few months now and love it for my basecamp and highrise apps. Only problem I have is when trying to use chat or writeboards it jumps off to firefox and asks for a password. If this could be fixed it would be perfect. Thanks.

Kevin Milden 18 Jan 08

Wow! Works great with Spaces. This is the thin client tool we have been dreaming about. Thank you…

steve 18 Jan 08

Fluid is great. Once they add campfire badges (and growl would be nice), It’ll be prefect. Sadly Pyro hasn’t been kept up with, and is rather buggy now.

Diego 18 Jan 08

Could we get a Writeboard logo too, please? Thanks

Jackson 18 Jan 08

@ Lars: I am having the same issue. Highrise, via Fluid, does not seem to work with OpenID.

Any thoughts?

djtal 18 Jan 08

Hello,

Thanks for the info i(ve never heard about Fluid before. Just an info, Prism run on OS X 4 /5 too, I use Google Reader in this way.

alan 18 Jan 08

pretty interesting. i wonder if we’ll ever get an .app domain extension. the mobile boys got theirs..

James Wheare 18 Jan 08

The biggest problem I have with Fluid is that it shares cookies with your main Safari session. So you can’t use it to have multiple accounts logged into a site at the same time (test accounts, shared work accounts.)

Nic 18 Jan 08

@James: That’s about the most important thing I’m looking for – I’d like to be able to be logged into gmail twice if I want to for instance.

Greig Rapley 18 Jan 08

@Emil: I have the same problem, really annoying. I can’t even find how to remove the password from the Writeboard. I’m surprised there aren’t more “Writeboards don’t work in Fluid” comments, and also the 37signals would “advertise” a third party product that doesn’t play nicely with the software they sell. Otherwise Fluid rocks, and for that matter so does Basecamp. Just not together (for Writeboards at least).

Jason Head 18 Jan 08

Cool. I was looking for a Backpack icon for Fluid!

The one thing I have noticed with Fluid that is bothering me is that whenever I try to grab an attachment (wether in G-mail or Basecamp so far) everything seems to go haywire. I’m hoping this gets fixed in later versions :(

Josh Owens 18 Jan 08

Any plans to make multi-room chat work right with Fluid and Basecamp?

Todd Ditchendorf 19 Jan 08

Josh, thanks for the Fluid shoutout! To everyone who’s tried Fluid, thanks!!! For those who have described Fluid issues here… um, I don’t bite, but I do accept bug reports. thanks.

Todd Ditchendorf 19 Jan 08

er.. make that David, thanks for the Fluid shoutout! :0]

Hendrik-Jan Francke 19 Jan 08

What a great concept. Testing it out today.

The Writeboard password will be an issue. Is the pw different for every writeboard? I wouldn’t mind a seperate Fluid app as a writeboard, but having to find the password each time is going to be a pain. Or to reset them all one by one is a pain.

Dan Dineen 19 Jan 08

Having the same issue as some on this board – I can’t log in to HighRise using OpenID. Trying to sign in opens Safari but Fluid doesn’t register that I am signed in to my Verisign OpenID in Safari. It just keeps on looping. I’d love to get this working properly though – looks like a great little app.

Alan Whitaker 22 Jan 08

@SS, looks like Todd has just added dock badge / growl apis in the 0.7 release. I would love to make this my new client once Campfire integrates those…based on your previous comment, any plans for that yet?

SS 22 Jan 08

Alan, yep, we made the necessary changes to Campfire for badge support this morning, and we’ll deploy them later tonight.

Alan Whitaker 22 Jan 08

As usual, 37s agility is delightful. Thanks!

Yaphi 22 Jan 08

SS thank you! I just noticed this. How about growl support?

Ken Collins 23 Jan 08

Wow… I just noticed this morning that I had badges in my Fluid campfire SSB and I AM LOVING IT !

Roger Wilco 23 Jan 08

For those of you having trouble getting Fluid to work with OpenID or Writeboards:

Open Basecamp in Fluid Cmd + , (for Preferences) Check “Allow browsing to other domains”

Done! You need the latest version (0.7 as I write this) for it to work.

Roger Wilco 23 Jan 08

Whoa, hey, guess who didn’t use Preview and thought Textile worked here. The answer is me. One more time for the ones who can’t decipher:

- Open Basecamp in Fluid

- Cmd + , (for Preferences)

- Check “Allow browsing to other domains”

Comments are closed