Monday 26 November 2007

Prism rocks! (Create desktop apps for web apps)

Many thanks to Dejan who blogged about this - but Prism rocks. I can now use Expose / Tab to switch between Gmail windows and other FireFox/Safari windows. I've been using it for a day so far and am really liking it. I've often got a ton of windows open in safari/firefox and frequently just wanna switch back to GMail.

Changes I'd like to see
  • support multiple Prism executables to run concurrently. e.g. GMail, GoogleReader, GCal, JIRA could all be apps
  • allow the icons to be easily customized for when switching with TAB or adding things to the dock.
But so far, its looking good!

Update - many thanks to Dave Brondsema who mentioned in the comments that you can have multiple webapps running with custom icons using the provided bundes from http://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism#Bundles
Though I tried them and they didn't wor for me too well on the Mac (I've not upgraded to Leopard yet :)
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7 comments:

  1. Dave Brondsema27 November 2007 at 13:40

    I tried out 0.8 last night and had multiple webapps running, and they had custom icons. Try some of the provided bundles from http://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism#Bundles

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  2. James Strachan27 November 2007 at 13:57

    Awesome Dave thanks!

    I tried out the bundles; double clicking on the gmail.webapp does indeed boot up a web app - but it just appears as Prism on OS X when I try tab-switching or looking in the dock.

    Are you using windows I wonder?

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  3. Unknown27 November 2007 at 14:28

    Hi! I am currently workin on CXF..It is possible to use JMS conduits AND SSL? (or SSL is only congiurable for HHTP?)
    Max.. (elessar_it@yahoo.it)

    ReplyDelete
  4. James Strachan27 November 2007 at 14:38

    Massimiliano, you'd be best off asking CXF related questions on the CXF forums.

    FWIW ActiveMQ supports SSL if you wanted to use that as the JMS transport in CXF.

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  5. Dave Brondsema27 November 2007 at 15:34

    I was using Linux, I haven't tried it on Windows yet. It's not surprising that the icon support varies by system. I don't see any bug reports for OS X icons, but this bug report mentions having a specific type of icon file for each operating system. So maybe it's just a matter of creating that icon file for OS X

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  6. Cedric27 November 2007 at 17:17

    Prims looks very ambitious, but I've never had much problems finding Firefox windows. I use "Fire Title", an add-on that lets me name my Firefox title the way I want them. I usually name the important windows with a leading "@" so they stand out: "@ E" = email, "@ Blogs" = blogs, etc...

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  7. Sam12 December 2007 at 21:24

    Yeah... Multiple prism app bundles didn't work for me either. On launching the second bundle, prism opened a new app window... but then nothing. I too would love to run gmail alongside gcal! As separate apps! I'm using OSX 10.4.11. Help!

    ReplyDelete