When visiting my friend Mark, he introduced me to a simple app called fluid. This OS X application captures web apps and lets you run them as embedded in a window like a native application. Then he showed me why that was even significant. He then pulled up a digg link he made. Then a reddit one. He continued to show off other cool features and stuff. Then he told me some sad news. Fluid is only for OS X. Then after he knew he had crushed my spirits, he told me about prism being “The one for Linux.” When I finally got-round to checking it out, I realized I had indeed heard about it a while back and that being more than just “the Linux one” it was fully cross platform.
Install -
For Ubuntu/LinuxMint (my current is 7, x86_64), it is already in the repositories.
sudo apt-get install prism
The version in the repos is older than the current beta but it is still stable enough to use. I opted to grab the latest tar from the website. I extracted the tar to /opt. Then I added a link to the Mint menu and launched it with GNOME-Do. I tested it first by adding slashdot. My friend mark showed my a trick though. Most regular sites are not well suited to a single small window. However, mobile edition of web-sites work great! With a little URL tricks, prism becomes even more useful.
I tested the browser plug-in on my LinuxMint box, however every time I tried to launch an app, it just launched my home pages in Firefox instead.
Some Video -
Here is one that is for the plugin.
Suggested Links -
Here are a few links and shots of some of the ones im using.
Slashdot :
http://slashdot.org/?ss=1
Digg:
http://m.digg.com
Engadget:
http://m.engadget.com
icon (I know its not the same but it is pretty!)
Reddit:
http://m.reddit.com
All Icons are licensed freely from IconsPedia [http://www.iconspedia.com
A shot of my desktop running a dock with my newly created prism links.
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Prism is great, and another primary bonus is that it’s running a stripped down version of Firefox = less overhead when not needed.
I was happily using Prism on Ubuntu 9.10, then swithed to Linux Mint 8 for my HTPC. Installed Prism to use for facebook, Gmail, and Pandora primarily, but something’s amiss in Mint. Links are created & work fine, but the names are and the icons look like a page of a book or letter. Renaming them does nothing, and when I select another image for the icon nothing happens. Never had this problem in Ubuntu so seems odd for it to happen in Mint.