6 Beautiful Fluid Mac Icons

There's no denying that the Internet is going to be a big part of our future of computing. Running applications in the cloud have already become popular, with services such as Google Apps, which we also offer to our clients. Whether you use Google Mail and Google Calendar to help to manage productivity, or social lifestyling apps like Twitter and Facebook, there's probably a web-based application or two running on your computer throughout the day.

If you use web-based applications on Windows, Google Chrome allows you to create app shortcuts to your computer for easy access. For Mac users, an application called Fluid is available for creating desktop aliases of web applications.

As a Mac user, one problem you may quickly encounter is that the app's Favicon (the small icon that appears in the address bar) becomes the alias desktop icon. For Mac users using Mac OS X Leopard, icons can go right up to 512x512 pixels in size. 16x16 Favicons suddenly get mighty pixelly.

As a solution I've created six beautiful icons for you all to use free of charge. I'm also posting some helpful URLs to help you on your way with building them. Download the beautiful icons now and they should be ready for you when you need them further down in the article.

Getting the apps up and running

First download Fluid. Unpack the app and either pop it into your Applications folder for later use, or leave it on your desktop for removal after this process is complete.

Open the app and enter the URL and name of the alias you would like to make. I'm going to give you the aliases for use with the icons that I have created for you. You can make your own aliases for any web app. I'll show you how to apply the icons after this step.

GMail

A popular one, no doubt. To get GMail on your desktop, enter http://mail.google.com as your Fluid URL, and name it "GMail" or "Google Mail". For Google Apps users, enter https://mail.google.com/a/YOURDOMAIN.COM/ as the URL, and name it the same, maybe with the domain name at the start. (E.g. I use "FC Google Mail".)

Google Docs

For Google Docs, enter http://docs.google.com as the Fluid URL. For Google Apps users, https://docs.google.com/a/YOURDOMAIN.COM/. Name it "Google Docs" or something specific to your domain (E.g. I use "FC Google Docs".)

Google Calendar

For Google Calendar, enter http://calendar.google.com as the Fluid URL. For Google Apps users, https://calendar.google.com/a/YOURDOMAIN.COM/. Name it "Google Calendar" or something specific to your domain (E.g. I use "FC Google Calendar".)

Google Tasks

Google Tasks is a new service, and doesn't really run on its own. It opens with either Google Mail or Google Calendar, and once one of those windows close so does Tasks. Here's how to get around that. Enter https://mail.google.com/tasks/iphone as the Fluid URL. For Google Apps users, enter https://mail.google.com/tasks/a/YOURDOMAIN.COM/iphone. Name it "Google Tasks", or something specific to your domain (E.g. I use "FC Google Tasks".) Once entered and created, open up the new app and go to the app's title contextual (top left corner, next to the Apple) and go to User Agent/Other. A little window will pop up. In it, paste the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20

Close that, and use Cmd+Shift+H to refresh the app. It should, now, display Google Tasks on your desktop, properly and independently.

Google Talk

Google Talk operates in a similar way to Google Tasks, in that it runs from within Google Mail. In order to get it running as an app, enter the Fluid URL https://hostedtalkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout. For Google Apps users, enter https://hostedtalkgadget.google.com/a/YOURDOMAIN.COM/talkgadget/popout instead. Name the app "Google Talk", or something specific to your domain (E.g. I use "FC Google Talk".)

Freshbooks

Finally, a Freshbooks app. We're big fans of Freshbooks and encourage you to go and check it out if you do any invoicing. Enter https://YOURACCOUNT.freshbooks.com/ as the Fluid URL, and name the app "Freshbooks".