Fluid

Submitted by mworkman on 7 January, 2012

Description of App:

Web applications like Gmail, Facebook, Campfire and Pandora are becoming more and more like desktop applications every day. Running each of these web apps in a separate tab in your browser can be a real pain.

Fluid lets you create a Real Mac App ( or "Fluid App" ) out of any website or web application, effectively turning your favorite web apps into OS X desktop apps.

Version:

1.2

Free or Paid:

Free

Version Of macOS App Was Tested On:

10.7.2

Accessibility Comments:

The app is completely accessible. See below for why a voiceover user, in particular, might want to use this app.

Usability:

The app is fully accessible with VoiceOver and is easy to navigate and use.

Other Comments:

In a recent post by Hayden Smith, he provided a useful tip for increasing the accessibility of Mobile Facebook on the Mac. The main drawback of the tip is that the user agent profile has to be changed every time Safari is restarted. By creating an app with Fluid, however, this problem is avoided.

After launching the app you have created with Fluid, go to the menu bar, arrow right once, and you will find a menu with the same name as the app you created. Move down until you find the user agent submenu and choose the user agent profile you would like. Refresh the browser, and the page will refresh in accordance with the new user agent profile. This will not affect tpages viewed in Safari, and it will be maintained even if the app is closed and reopened.

One other potential use that I have not fully explored is the creation of Activities. Because the websites turned into Fluid Apps become separate apps, Activities can be assigned for each one. Thus, you could theoretically have hotspots and other settings associated not only with various apps, but with various websites. When I briefly tried this, though, the hotspots didn't seem to stick very well, so I don't know how well this works in practice.