Chuck Hagenbuch

Fluid let's you create native MacOS site-specific browers (or SSBs) for web applications, based on WebKit (there's also Prism, based on Gecko, but Fluid has some nice MacOS touches in it that I'm taking advantage of).

There are a couple of reasons you might want to do this for Horde or another web application. One is that it's just sort of cool; you can have Horde sitting in your dock with a custom icon. You can even see the number of unread emails you have using MacOS dock badges:

Another reason is that web browsers still crash a lot. Fluid SSBs are their own separate WebKit instance, so misbehaving sites (... ahem) can't muck with your webmail windows and cause you to lose mostly written email (or vice versa, especially with Gmail).

Creating an SSB for Horde is pretty easy. First, of course, download Fluid. Then grab a high-resolution copy of the Horde gear logo for your dock:

http://horde.org/graphics/logos/gear.png

Now launch Fluid, and fill out the few fields to point to your Horde installation. In the Icon dropdown, choose Other... and navigate to the copy of gear.png that you just downloaded:

Now just click Create and you're ready to launch Horde!

A few notes:

• Fluid 0.8.1 has drastically improved tabbed browsing for me. If you have an older version, upgrade (you can upgrade individual SSBs, too!)
• I tried to get Fluid to grab a nice icon for Horde automatically, including by putting apple-touch-icon.png in the base horde/ dir, in my webroot, etc., but couldn't get it to work. If you have this working, I'd be happy to add the necessary bits to Horde for it.
• To see the number of unread messages in Horde's dock badge, you need this patch (for IMP HEAD, but it should apply cleanly to an IMP 4.2 RC also): http://cvs.horde.org/diff.php?r1=2.857&r2=2.858&f=imp%2Fmailbox.php
• The high-res gear looks good, but it's not quite "lickable" in the mac way. If anyone has a high-res alternate Horde icon (gear or otherwise!) I'd love to see it and talk about using it.
  

About two weeks ago, my MacBook's hard drive the sudden death that leaves you asking, "why!?". I had backups of just about everything, but it was still a pain to get the replacement drive, restore everything, and reconfigure the machine. I tried to take it as an opportunity to start fresh in a few places, though. I also made a complete disk image when the machine was rebuilt, just in case.

The first decision was dropping Fink in favor of MacPorts. Nothing particularly against Fink, but MacPorts has more recent releases (both of individual ports and of the main software), and being part of Mac OS forge is a plus. I waffled a lot on this one especially after my first attempt to install kcachegrind with MacPorts failed, but after the update to 1.520, it worked perfectly.

I've loved QuickSilver ever since being introduced to it, and I think it completely deserves its cult. However, I barely scratch the surface of its features, and it is a little pokey and memory intensive for how I use it. Namely (http://amarsagoo.info/namely/) is a wee little launcher that only searches applications, which is all I want. Fast, pretty, I love it. To get it out of my Dock I used Dockless (http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/dockless/dockless.html).

There are two things that I've started using recently that aren't exactly replacing anything, but they're too good to overlook. One is sshfs, part of MacFuse (http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/). This lets you mount any account you can SSH to as a remote drive. It's fast enough that I can use a local editor at work to edit files on my development sandbox, and it's really nice not to have to deal with samba on my MythTV server. I have an AppleScript that will mount a given share in a way that works with SSHKeychain and agent forwarding ... AppleScript is something else I am oh-so-slowly getting in to these days.

Finally, I recently bought a laptop desk, and I am smitten: http://www.laptopdesk.net/laptopdesk_futura.html. I highly recommend it - very light and portable, fits in my Spire laptop backpack (another very highly recommended product) perfectly, and works as a desk stand also. And $30 seems pretty cheap for a nice laptop desk.

And now I'm off and running with the "new" machine.