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.

Yesterday I purchased a new Santa Rosa Macbook, and it's been an extremely positive experience so far. The machine is fantastic, and I'm overall pretty impressed with Leopard. Nothing mind-blowing, but it just feels like a more mature OS than Tiger. The pre-release chatter about "lots of little features" is spot on... so far there's no one killer app for me, but plenty of small improvements.

One thing that really stands out for me is the improved Terminal.app. For several years, one of my first installs on a new Mac has been iTerm, a great, free, open-source terminal replacement for OSX. iTerm is very customizable and makes use of a tabbed interface that is a necessity for developers like myself who spend most of the day logged into shells on multiple machines.

With Leopard, Apple has introduced into Terminal the little bits of the functionality that have had me using iTerm for so long. Terminal now supports tabs, and comes with a set of customizable themes -- my old standby of green text on black is now a preset option that I can tweak and save as the default setting.

The only thing I find difficult to adjust to are the keyboard shortcuts to switch between tabs. I am used to using command-left and command-right to change tabs, but by default, the Leopard Terminal uses command-shift-{ and command-shift-}. It's an awkward shortcut, especially for one that I use hundreds of times a day.

My solution was to modify the keyboard shortcut for Terminal.app. This can be done manually, under System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts, but here's an Applescript that will achieve the same effect:

tell application "Terminal" to quit
do shell script ¬
  "defaults write com.apple.Terminal NSUserKeyEquivalents " & ¬
  "-dict-add 'Select Next Tab' '@\\UF703' " & ¬
  "'Select Previous Tab' '@\\UF702';"
delay 1
tell application "Terminal" to launch