Creating a standalone web app with Fluid or Prism
Why run the Admin as a standalone app?
If you’ve ever find yourself with 40 tabs spread across 3 different Firefox windows, you might have wondered if there was a way to separate one particular tab out on its own, separate from all the rest. This could be useful for:
- Keeping sessions separate. (Have separate accounts open at the same time. I use it for playing with live and dev accounts at the same time.)
- Assigning a shortcut key to quickly access the tab in question (a la Quicksilver).
- Keeping things secure (and preventing bad things from happening).
- Keeping an important window open when your browser crashes (as just happened to me).
All of these reasons could be nice for the FoxyCart admin, especially if you’re actively working on a site, or have a few sites under the same admin account that you need access to on a consistent basis.
Creating the application
OS X: Enter Fluid
There are a few methods for doing this on a Mac (including Prism, below), but Fluid.app is probably as easy as it’s going to get. Simply enter the URL of the FoxyCart admin, give it a name like “FoxyCart”, and save. For bonus points you may want to grab a higher res version of our logo here and use that as the app icon. Unfortunately the .ico format doesn’t go higher than 64×64.
Fluid uses your system’s built-in webkit and is a nice, native OS X application. Only bummer with it at this point is that your passwords aren’t saved, and 1password doesn’t currently support Fluid apps.
Windows & Linux: Mozilla’s Prism
Same thing for Windows, but this time with Prism, which uses Firefox’s Gecko engine to render pages.
That’s it. Not earth-shattering, but neat.
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Questions?
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