Ellington

Sometimes you don't realize how fantastic a feature can be until you use it under real-world conditions. For instance, I learned to love Fluid for Mac (http://www.fluidapp.com), when I got it set up to run Capsule­CRM (http://www.capsulecrm.com), one of the tools we use for sales management (like, hourly) here at the Jackson Free Press publishing empire.

What makes Fluid cool is that it can essentially turn any hosted Web application—such as your CRM, Gmail, Google Docs, or Quickbooks Web Edition—into something that feels like a standalone desktop application, with its own icon and its own presence on the Dock. And that's not just handy for launching the app. The killer feature is how handy it makes it to switch to that Web-based app.

Imagine your life right now, where your Gmail or Yahoo! Or Facebook account is probably buried somewhere in the windows of Safari or Firefox or Chrome. Yuck.

Now picture Gmail (or Yahoo or Facebook) with its own icon, own window, own tabs and the ability to Apple+tab directly to it. That's what Fluid does.

I've got "apps" for Capsule, WorkFlowy, Gmail, Google Docs, BackPack and Zoho right on my Dock, for easy access and switching. (Bonus feature: You can keep your cookies separate in different apps if you desire, giving you a "sandboxed" app for, say, accessing your bank account or http://www.Mint.com.)

Mac this, Mac that? Well, there isn't an exact equivalent for Windows that I can find, but Google Chrome's "Create Application Shortcut" command (under the Wrench icon, then Tools > Create Application Shortcut) offers a similar experience.

While viewing a site, choose the command and it adds a shortcut for that Web page to your desktop. Click it later and you'll have a standalone Chrome browser window for that particular hosted application. You don't get quite the same firewall, although it is its own application thread, meaning a crash in the application shortcut shouldn't crash other instances of Chrome.