Web App App Factory

It’s increasingly common to have multiple browser windows constantly open to various web apps (mail, calendar, IM, etc). If you also use your web browser a lot for actual web browsing, this gets to be a pain (hard to find, accidentally closed, etc.).

With the availability of WebKit in OS X 10.4, its simple to make tiny standalone apps which contain a full featured web engine. Several of these “Web App Apps” exist already for e.g. GMail, but I haven’t seen a trivial way to construct your own standalone .app for a particular URL.

Starting from one of the better existing apps, move all customization (start URL, domains to open locally vs domains to open using the default http handler, perhaps URL handler registration) into the .plist. Then build a simple app to guide the customization of one of these Web App Apps.

Solutions

• Fluid is pretty much exactly what I described!
• Prism is similar, but Windows-only.