Prism – from Mozilla – tries to integrate web applications with your desktop by giving you an icon and dedicated browser window for each application you configure. That’s it.
I saw Prism when it was first announced, but never got around to looking at it. Then a recent post by Lee Tambiah reminded me about it and I actually got around to looking at it just now.
Installation is simple:
- Download the tarball from here
- Extract it to a folder in your home directory (e.g. /home/you/prism)
- Then for each site you want to “applicationise”, run /home/you/prism/prism and give it a URL and name, check the options and ask it to create a desktop icon
- When you want to re-open the application, double-click the relevant icon on your desktop
Nice and simple, eh?
There’s not really a lot else to say. It’s Gecko based, so it will work as well as Firefox. There’s no tabs, Extensions or Flash – I’ll let you decide if that’s good or bad.
For sites like Twitter, Pownce or Google Calendar (and at a pinch, Facebook) it’s great, but without tabs I couldn’t imagine using it for Google Reader, or Launchpad.