This might turn into somewhat of a multi-parter as I’m finding myself becoming increasingly more enchanted with Fluid and the idea of site specific browsers in general (SSB). So, in this post, I would just like to introduce Fluid and the SSB concept.

In one sentence, I’d condense the SSB concept to the following: Confining a website to a single independent browser running as a stand-alone app. Yep. There you go. If I were to expand that into two sentences, I’d add: It feels like you’re running a website as a desktop app. The best way to visualize this is to use an example that many of us are probably familiar with: webmail. Imagine taking Gmail (or Yahoo! Mail… or (god forbid) Hotmail…) and turning it into a desktop application that you can launch in its own space, removed from the browser. Hot!

But why the heck would I even want to do that? Well, many of us (myself included) feel that certain web activities, like email, should be separate from other online activities, like shopping and the ambiguous, surfing (email, for me, and presumable many others, is a constant. If the computer is on, email is happening… not necessarily so with other activities). Using the SSB method, your webmail is now separate from other casual web use. You can close and open and interact with your browser without touching your email.

Okay, enough of that. What about Fluid? So Fluid is a Mac app that creates these SSBs (there are, I’m sure, PC equivalents… but I’ll leave it to another blogger to point to those). Just aim it at a URL and hit go! Next thing you know, you’ve got a brand new app sitting on your desktop (or wherever). It’s just about that easy. What makes Fluid so special though, is some of the other stuff that it can do… like support for custom icons (more on that later), plug-ins, user styles, and the ability to turn the whole dang SSB in to a menu bar app (definitely more on this in a future post)! Oh and if you are turning something like Gmail into an SSB, Fluid will auto-magically change it’s dock badge to reflect the number of unread messages in your inbox (if you’re SSBing Google Reader, it’ll do the same with unread posts)!

Alright, one more geeky thing to note and then we’ll call it a day: WebKit. WebKit is the open source rendering engine behind such browsers as Safari and the lesser known Omniweb and Shiira. Anyway, if the website works in Safari, it’s pretty much gaurunteed to work as a Fluid app because both are using the WebKit engine as their rendering platform.

Homework: Go get Fluid and build a site specific browser! Later, we’ll talk about tricking this thing out…