Archive for May, 2010
Fluid + MenuExtra = Even More Awesome
I just ran across an incredibly useful feature in Fluid, thanks to @takeo. The 'Convert to MenuExtra SSB' feature allows you to run a single site browser as a menu item at the top of your screen. Brilliant! I now realize that my life has not been complete until today. This is easily my new favorite feature of Fluid.
Why would you want to do this?
You seriously have you ask? Okay… I'll humor you. Once I understood what this feature did, I immediately came up with a few benefits:
- Keep Fluid apps that you rarely interact with out of the way
- Keep Fluid apps that you tend to need quickly at the ready
- Get a Fluid app out of the app switcher
I'm sure there are more reasons, but those are the ones that sold me. My use case was MOG, an online subscription music player. It uses a Flash interface for its player, which was a real disappointment to realize, but here we are.
What I didn't want
When I started using MOG, I just opened it in Chrome, opened their player in the popup window, moving it to my media Space. First of all, that's an annoying process, not practical at all for a service I want to use daily. They don't have a desktop player yet, and from what I hear, it will be in Adobe Air anyway, of which I'm not a huge fan. Don't get me wrong, they did a great job on the player's interface, its just… well, its Flash.
Creating a Fluid app would surely be useful in keeping MOG distinct throughout my experience using the site, but its still a clunky browser window that doesn't size correctly to the Flash interface of the player without – yet again – opening the popup through the site. So, what would be the benefit of creating a Fluid app for MOG?
At Last: Awesomeness!
This is where the solution I found came into play. I'll just give you the step by step on how to get this running smoothly and let you decide whether or not its worth the time.
Creating the Fluid app
To start things off, we need to create a new Fluid SSB for mog.com.
Now open the new the newly created application.
Fixing an issue with Spaces
This next step is for those of you who use Spaces. If you don't, feel free to skip this one: Open System Preferences followed by Exposé & Spaces. In the Spaces tab, look for your new Fluid app in the list below. In the second column, select Every Space for your app and close System Preferences. This will prevent some Space-switching grief when we move into MenuExtra mode.
This can also be accomplished from inside the application itself. In the app's Preferences, click on the Behavior tab. Change the top option (Spaces Behavior) to "Windows Appear in all Spaces".
Login and Fluid Settings
In your Fluid app, log into MOG. You don't have to yet, but its easier to do it now while in this mode. These next two steps are critical for maximizing the awesomeness, so pay attention! Navigate to http://mog.com/player in your SSB to bring up the player, then hide the Toolbar, either through the Viewmenu or by pressing Cmd+Opt+T. Lastly, setting a Global shortcut is a very good idea. On the first tab in the app's preferences, you'll be able to accomplish this.
MenuExtra Time
Now, select the MOG menu option (or whatever you named your app) followed by Convert to MenuExtra SSB....
Accept the warning that pops up next. You will now see a new icon in your menu bar!
Clicking this new icon will bring up the player in a popup window. It is resizable, but not scrollable. Furthermore, you can access this menu item from any Space now. Let me know if you find any other sites that work really well with this setup, or perhaps other benefits to using MenuExtra SSBs that I've not mentioned here.
edited by Ryan Cross
@takeo just threw this icon together which I think looks pretty darned nice in the menu bar. Thanks, Toby.
Custom Categories in iBooks
So, the iPad has finally arrived. I'm probably enjoying mine more than I should be.
I find myself particularly drawn to iBooks with regards to technical books. I am incredibly grateful to The Pragmatic Bookshelf and O'Reilly for making previously purchased ebooks available in the epub format, the format native to iBooks (as well as many other readers including Stanza, the iPhone app that had this capability a few years ago).
As much as I have been enjoying this app, I've been frustrated with how the seemingly arbitrary categories sort the books when viewing the them in list view. One such category was:
COMPUTERS / Hardware / Personal Computers / MacintoshSeriously? Not only this, but the formatting was awful! Some were in partial caps while others used slashes and other various characters. It turns out the fix was really simple!
The Fix
In iTunes, under the Books library, start by right-clicking on an ebook and selecting Get Info. Heading over to the Info tab reveals the answer. iBooks is apparently using the Genre of the ebooks as the categories!
Meh. Okay, I can see how that makes sense. Come up with a way to logically organize the ebooks you have and go to town! I found that the technical books I currently have seem to fall under 'Web Development' and 'iPhone Development'. Much better.
Next complaint
I'd love to see categories make their way into the shelf view. There's currently no way to sort the books found in this view.