PurplePaste

People speak about how applications have been moving from the desktop to the web. Web-based email and calendaring have seen huge improvements over the past couple of years, Google Docs and Microsoft Office Live are bringing very capable office suites to the web, and even image editors are appearing online. Flickr recently added an image editor to their arsenal, powered by Picnik.

I like this progression. Data portability is important, and application portability is going to become equally important as handheld devices provide more and more functionality. I like being able to check my Gmail account from my Mac at work, my Macbook, my phone, and my girlfriend's Windows machine, without dealing with installing and configuring applications or syncing data.

But there is one problem with running so many of my applications in the web browser - when web browsers crash (and they do, especially when you have 80 tabs open), everything grinds to a halt, and data and information is lost (at least temporarily).

Fluid is a free, Leopard application that provides an interesting solution - stick your important web apps into a desktop app. As a separate application (using WebKit, so it works just as well as Safari), the application is siloed off from your other apps, so when Firefox or Safari crashes, your Fluid apps are still there, unaffected. You can even launch the web app from the dock, and the ability to use the favicon as the icon is a nice touch.

It's similar to the Mozilla Prism project, which the developer of fluid credits for his inspiration. You can download Fluid from fluidapp.com.