Gmail and Google Reader as Desktop Applications?
Yes you can. Mozilla Labs has a project called Prism (formerly Webrunner) that allows you to run a web browser like window without the standard web browser functionality. Apart from giving you a more convenient way of launching your web applications it also runs as a separate process than your ordinary web browser. This means that if your web browser crashes or is bogged down with all your tabs, your web application is still safe in it’s own process. Another feature is that you can reach your web application faster than via your web browser.
I’m pretty happy with it even though I have found one missing feature. I usually read my podcasts in Google Reader and when a new episode is available I right click the media file and saves it to my desktop. Unfortunately isn’t the save as option available in Prism. But anyhow, it’s worth trying out!
Prism running Google Reader.
You can make shortcuts that launches the Prism application with your preset web site (in this case Google Reader).
Prism shortcuts
I’ve tried it on Windows but it’s supposed to work under Linux and Mac OS X as well.
Update: I’m not currently using this since I found some problems. The most important is that I’m used to open up blogs I read in different tabs instead of reading them in Google Reader and I haven’t found any way to do this with Prism. I guess it would defeat the point somewhat…
November 1st, 2007
Have you seen the cool work they’re doing on the icons?
http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/10/24/prism/
November 1st, 2007
No I hadn’t seen that. Looks cool! Thanks for pointing that out.
November 1st, 2007
Another eventual positive side effect is that you don’t need to be logged in to Google in your regular browser (since you are accessing Gmail via Prism).
I guess this makes it harder for Google (or other companies) to gather personal data (if you think that’s something to be careful about).