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 :)

7 comments:

Dave Brondsema said...

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

James Strachan said...

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?

Unknown said...

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)

James Strachan said...

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.

Dave Brondsema said...

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

Cedric said...

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...

Sam said...

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!