Fluid has just been updated. It’s a clever new app that allows you to make your own site-specific browsers (including the power of Greasemonkey scripts in Cocoa).
Along with a raft of bugfixes, the new version (0.9.2) can now turn the browswers into menubar items for even greater flexibility.
Longtime Hawk Wings readers will remember the small flurry of site-specific web apps two years — Michael McCracken’s WebMail app for Gmail and Chip Cuccio’s GCal app for Google Calendar. With no bookmarks, other windows and other temptations, these apps allowed users to focus on their productivity without distractions.
Fluid works on the same principle. Based on Mozilla’s Prism app 
, it creates a site-specific app, complete with its own Dock icon, menubars and other individual settings.
Here are some that I made earlier for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, mint and facebook:
Now, when I want to get the email done, I open the Gmail app, when I want to unwind I turn to the facebook one. I am never tempted to work when I should be relaxing, nor to relax when I should be at work. (That’s the theory; as every “Getting Things Done” fan knows deep in their heart, in the end no app can save you from yourself!).
The ability to run Greasemonkey scripts inside these Fluid apps is very cool. Previously only really available to Firefox users, Fluid now lets me load my two favourite scripts from userscripts.org so that I can use Gmail with killer keyboard macros and some of the noise taken out of the Gmail interface:
Fluid’s free-standing apps can each have their own preference settings. The overall behaviour of the window is also customizable — overlaid on the Dashboard, normal, floating or embedded in the Desktop. Here, for example, is my mint in Fluid’s simple black HUD style:
A Flickr group – Fluid Icons – offers lots of nice looking Dock icons for various web sites. I scored most of the icons in the screenshot above from there.
The possibilities seem enormous, and this article only scratches the surface of the app’s potential.
This updated version lets you turn a browser into a menubar utility, so that clicking on its menubar icon opens its window–instant, roll-your-own to-do lists in a Fluid-generated Remember the Milk or Stikkit app!
Fluid is freeware and available from the Fluid web site .
