Turning webpages into applications on a mac

There are some web applications out there, that you wish were actually applications instead of firing up a web browser and navigating to the web application. Well you can if you have a mac, with a program called Fluid. It’s simple and easy. I recently converted a weather web app into a full blown application. If you live in Houston, you know the weather changes drastically from one day to the next. Like yesterday, it was warm in the 70’s and then last night it was in the 30’s. However I wanted a weather app that was easy and simple to use. So I created one with Fluid and Weather Underground and put the instructions below. This will work for any webpage, if you can navigate to it, it will work. Now I’m not sure if there is an application like this for windows, but if you know of any please let us know via comments. EDIT: Check out Prism for Windows which does pretty much the same thing.

1. First download Fluid and install it on your mac.

2. Now navigate to the webpage you want to turn into a app. I used this site from weather underground. http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/.

3. Now I navigated to Houston, because I wanted Houston to be the main focus in the web application which was the following URL.

4. Now fire up Fluid.

5. Insert the URL you want to convert, give the application a name, and a icon (if you want, otherwise it will pull the favicon from the website URL)

6. Now just hit create and your application should look like the one below I made for the weather app. Simple as that, place the new app in your dock or wherever you want.

Note: You can also make the app part of your desktop, by going to your newly created app and converting it to an embedded SSB. Here is a Youtube video link for more instruction regarding SSBs.