Useful new toy: Prism

[jducoeur]

For those who are interested in bleeding-edge tech: you may want to check out Prism, an experimental program from Mozilla.

It's one of a number of entries into the new movement to blur the line between the browser and the desktop. (Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight are also playing in this space.) Prism is arguably the simplest such program: it's largely a repackaging of Firefox, that allows you to turn websites into desktop applications. You give it a URL, and it puts it onto your system's desktop and/or menus as if it was an application. Open the "app", and the webpage opens in a new window.

My first reaction to this was a big shrug, but it occurred to me today that this is actually *very* useful to me. The thing is, I'm maintaining two identities on Google: my personal jducoeur at gmail account, as well as jducoeur at commyou.com. (Whose internal email, calendar and such are all being handled through Google Apps.) That's a real pain, because Google gets a bit confused between them. But Prism apps each have their own profile in Firefox, which clears away the confusion: I can run different users in different windows, something that is normally challenging in Firefox.

Prism is explicitly a prototype, and likely to change a lot as things go along -- among other things, they're starting to integrate it right into Firefox 3 as a plugin. But it's already looking useful for certain use cases, and may well make a lot of sense for these sorts of productivity apps that I just want to have open each day...

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

There are a few options for this for Mac, but then, Safari is in the OS. (Despite that lawsuit against Explorer! I don't know how that works.) I had a widget for LJ for a while, and turned a couple of desktop sites into apps, but then it turned out that web browsers are a better OS than Mac OS in terms of managing windows and tabs!

Monopoly extension

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Safari is in the OS. (Despite that lawsuit against Explorer! I don't know how that works.)

Different circumstances. MS wasn't sued for integrating IE into the OS, per se; they were sued for extension of monopoly power: using their OS monopoly to gain a monopoly in the browser market. Apple, needless to say, has no OS monopoly.

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

You could also just create a separate Firefox profile... (I've got two at the moment: one for FF3, One for FF2.) firefox/firefox.exe -ProfileManager will give you the GUI to create such things.

[jducoeur]

Oh, sure -- there are lots of ways to slice the problem. (Indeed, one of the reasons I use Chrome mode for my unit testing is that it makes it easy to run several well-separated FF processes.) But this one does seem to suit certain use cases rather well...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Would this help with part of the multi-id problem?
http://gmailassistant.sourceforge.net/

[jducoeur]

Huh -- for part of it, yes. Thanks for the pointer: I might well pick that up...

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Hmm. While I can see a number of uses for Prism, I'm surprised there isn't something a bit more suited to that specific use. If it's one page, presumably it's for single-page-load AJAX apps, but if you wanted all your iGoogle accounts to function together you'd really want them on a single profile. Having some mechanism within the browser to manage which tabs and windows use which profiles might be a better match. Not, of course, that you shouldn't work with the solution that's actually going smoothly for you...

[laurion]

As mentioned above, there's something similar for the Mac, which wraps up WebKit (Safari Engine). I use it to make a Google Calendar 'App'. I should check out Prism on my PC at work to wrap up Gecko the same way.

Although I love having my calendar available to me from anywhere, I interact with it as an application, and not as a web page, and I don't want it to get lost in the clutter of my myriad tabs. This isn't true for the other Google apps that I use. I am a sporadic (at best!) user of Docs, so don't need to keep that loaded, and although I am an obsessive user of Google Reader, I am explicitly interacting with it and its results as web content, and the last thing I want is to take that _out_ of my web browsing.

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

Can you convince me that there is a reason I want the line blurred rather than sharpened? Security wise.

Thank You kindly.

[jducoeur]

A fair point, although not very different from any other desktop app. (Actually, I'm not sure that Prism introduces any additional security risks, although AIR probably does.)