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30 Web Apps You Should Turn into Mac Apps with Fluid

We’re surrounded by web apps. That’s a given. Since the beginning of the web 2.0 era, we started collecting logins, passwords, subscriptions..I mean, who on earth hasn’t ever heard of  Gmail? My dad (yeah, I always choose him as my example) has a Gmail account.

But, there’s a problem: have you realized how much visual space do all these web apps steal from your browser window? I tell you: a lot. Mail + Facebook + Google Reader + Digg + Last.fm (pretty popular services almost everyone uses) are 5 open tabs in your browser. And if you have an horizontal tabs layout, you know that five tabs are too much.

But remember, we are Mac users, couldn’t there be a solution? Sure!

If you daily use a lot of web apps, Fluid.app will make your lives easier. With Fluid you can create SSB, Site Specific Browsers.

Put simply, you can turn a webapp into a desktop application that will run into your dock.

Developed by Todd Ditchendorf, Fluid is a lightweight application which will sit in your Applications folder, waiting for you to open it and tell it to create a new desktop app from url. The process is simple and fast: paste the url, choose a location for the app, pick up a custom icon or use the default one. And you’re done.

Moreover, Fluid.app supports Tabbed Browsing, built-in Userscripting, URL pattern matching for browsing whitelists and blacklists. See all the features at the official site.

Anyway, in this post I’ve collected 30 of the best webapps you should turn into desktop apps with Fluid.

Enjoy! ;)

Gmail

World’s most popular online mail service.

Google Docs

Edit and share documents online. Killer app.

Google Calendar

Google Voice

Google’s revolutionary VOIP app. Follow this Lifehacker tutorial to make a perfect desktop app.

Google Tasks

Simple to-do manager.

Analytics

Another great service by Google to monitor your website’s visitors with tons of other detailed stats.

Google Wave

Big G’s latest collaborative tool. Still in Beta.

Google Reader (with Helvetireader skin)

A cool facelift for Google Reader by John Hicks.

Facebook Chat

WordPress

Move your blog’s admin panel onto your dock. Very useful.

280 Slides

Create beautiful presentations online.

Instapaper

Save pages for later. Restyled with Instapaper restyled.

Digg

MobileMe

Backpack - Campire - Backfire - Highrise

Picasa

Flickr

Dropbox

Get Satisfaction

Hootsuite

Hahlo

Last.fm / Pandora

Mint

A stunning stats webapp from Shaun Inman.

Fever

A revolutionary online feeds reader, by Shaun Inman.

github

Freshbooks

Easy and simple online invoicing tool.

Resources:

Flickr Fluid icons group

Chris Ivarson’s Icons

Further Reading:

Using Fluid to Create Site Specific Browsers (via Smoking Apples)

15 Fluid Apps You Can Build for Your Business (via ReadWriteWeb)

How to Get More Out of Fluid (via Mac.AppStorm)

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