Kicking off our WWDC 2008 interview series is a chat with Todd Ditchendorf, developer of Fluid. We caught up with Todd shortly after the Keynote and offered him a penny for his thoughts. We covered thoughts on the iPhone, Mobile Me, the future of Fluid and more. The interview took place before our last post on Fluid was written, so there's no mention of the Safari 4.0 seed that was distributed shortly after. Video after the jump.
Posts with tag fluid
WWDC '08: Interview with Todd Ditchendorf
Apple seeds developers with Safari 4.0
Apple has seeded developers with a copy of the new Safari 4, which adds some new features and is based on a newer version of WebKit. Apple is also rumored to be using the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine which allows for faster Javascript processing.New to this version of Safari is the ability to save webpages as "Web Applications." This new feature allows Safari to save pages similar to the way Fluid does. You also have the ability to choose how new windows will open (i.e. with your favorite bookmark, blank page, etc.).
One of the biggest "features" is the fact that Safari 4 (along with the new version of WebKit) scored a perfect 100/100 on the Acid3 test. If you are inclined to see what the new version looks like, World of Apple has placed some screen grabs on their blog for your viewing pleasure.
Cover Flow for a more Fluid browsing experience
Fluid, the site-specific browser we've featured before, has added a sweet new feature: Cover Flow for sites like Google, Digg, Flickr and more.
In case you haven't given it a shot yet, Fluid allows you to create mini-browsers that are specific to a site – such as GMail, for example – giving you an icon in the Dock and quick access to your most-used pages. Fluid's author, Todd Ditchendorf, has made a short video that – with an entertaining musical score – shows the usage of the new Cover Flow feature, as well as showing some basic tricks for making the most of Fluid. Fluid is free, so check it out and make your site-specific browsing experience that much cooler.
Fluid makes site specific browsers easy
We've covered the concept of site specific browsers before. Basically these are stand-alone browsers designed to work with just one website, e.g. Gmail. Fluid takes this idea to the next level by automating the process of creating Webkit based site specific browsers. When you launch Fluid it asks for the URL and name of the site, and then it creates a Cocoa application just for that particular site. The reason that this is handy is that it separates your general browsing (and related crashes) from your Gmail, facebook, etc. Fluid is in beta and can be downloaded from Todd Ditchendorf and requires Leopard.
