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.
  

Given its idiosyncrasies, IE is often in need of, and lacking, better debugging tools that Firefox or even Safari provide. There are some options though. I'm just glad I get to run them inside Parallels. ;-)

Microsoft has the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar (updated May '07), which is somewhat similar to the Firefox Web Developer extension. Better for scripting is the free version of Visual Web Developer. And here's an IEBlog entry on it as well.

Execute this command in a Terminal window and then re-launch Safari to get a Debug menu with useful things like, oh, a JavaScript console:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

There's also WebKit with Drosera, which I'm not as familiar with - just having the console has been enough for me to troubleshoot most Safari-specific problems. With WebKit there's an equivalent to the "Inspect Element" that Firebug provides when you right-click on something. With old WebKits you may need a similar defaults write trick:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

I'm a big fan of the HTML Validator Firefox plugin; I spent a few days cleaning up markup on my sites when I first installed it. Safari Tidy provides something very similar.

Finally for now, http://pimpmysafari.com/ is a general resource for Safari plugins, bookmarklets, etc.