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.

Luckily, I walked out of the installation process unscathed for the most part with only a few minor issues to deal with.  One example would be that Phusion Passenger was no longer working – but mongrel was – so that was livable.  Realizing that I'd not yet setup a decent database for development since getting my new MacBook Pro, I set to work on basically reinstalling the entire Rails stack to ensure that everything would be ready to roll when I get back to work on Monday.

I found a few fantastic resources to guide me through the majority of what I was looking to do including Hivelogic's guide on Compiling Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails on Snow Leopard as well as another guide on Compiling Git on Snow Leopard.  I also found some great information on installing PostgreSQL on Snow Leopard. Lastly, I discovered a very short guide on compiling the PostgreSQL RubyGem for use on Snow Leopard (enabling 64bit compatibility).

Equipped with these guides, I successfully got everything upgraded and am now waiting for all of the other 10.6 bugs to pop up!

edit: A definitive guide in deed. I just found a guide for those of you who want to install things like MySQL and SQLite as well.

Luckily, thanks to the addition of Smart Playlists way back in iTunes 3 as well as the presence of a common element amongst all Amazon-purchased MP3s, we can solve this problem with very little effort.

All MP3s downloaded from Amazon contain a string starting with "Amazon.com Song ID", we can safely assume that any MP3s with "Amazon" in the Comments field will be from Amazon.  Unless, that is, you have a penchant for adding the word "Amazon" to your MP3s' manually.  To each their own.

First, create your new Smart Playlist by going to 'File' > 'New Smart Playlist…'.  We're going to want to modify the existing rule to look for something in the Comment field, so select 'Comment', 'contains' and enter 'Amazon' in the last field.

So, now you have a playlist with all of your Amazon purchases in it!  If you want to be really cool, and want a single playlist containing all purchases from both Amazon and the iTunes Store, you can create a second Smart Playlist that looks like this.  One note worth mentioning: I have an iPhone, so I included my iPhone purchases playlist as the second rule. If you don't have an iPhone, simply disregard that rule.

If you are not seeing any results from this last playlist, it is likely you forgot to change the top drop down box from "all" to "any".  Enjoy!