Further Into the Cloud
Over the years, I’ve managed to migrate all of our our operations to “the cloud,” using web-based applications, as opposed to their desktop elders.
As I’ve written before (and preached to our clients), the benefits are numerous… No more having to maintain hardware and networks, instant sharing and collaboration with team members without needing an infrastructure, and so-forth.
One of the last hurdles (for me) was getting the ease-of-use I wanted, being able to work with what I need to work with, without having everything running as tabs in my browser.
Not so long ago, the team at Google added a great feature to their Chrome browser, called Application Shortcuts. Application Shortcuts essentially convert a web application (such as Gmail) into something close to a desktop application. The application loads in its own window, and runs independently of what’s happening in your browser.
Recently, the folks at Mozilla created something similar for Firefox. The Mozilla Prism plugin for Firefox provides the same funtionality, with some additional configuration options not available in Chrome.
For the most part, I’m now running most of my web applications as Chrome Application Shortcuts (it’s noticeably faster than Firefox), but one in particular (SugarCRM) is cumbersome without the basic back/next functionality of the browser. Using Firefox Prism, I have the option to include that basic navigation in the window (an option not available in Chrome), so I now have a “hybrid” computer, running both Chrome Application Shortcut windows, and Firefox Prism apps, which seem to coexist peacefully, regardless of which browser is set as the default:
Here’s a quick video about how to use application shortcuts in Google Chrome:
And this should give you a good overview of the Prism plugin for Firefox:
