Fluid: Less is more.

Here's one more tool that I wish I could use at school but can't because our computers are mostly all Windows: Fluid.

Nowadays whenever my Art Club meets I send them to the art club website.  In my infinite wisdom I used my academicaesthetic.com domain name to host the club's blog, which as the year comes to a close is still causing issues due to students having trouble spelling "aesthetic."  (To be honest if I wasn't an art teacher I'd have problems with that word as well.)

There are many ways to solve this problem.  For me, I gave them cards with the URL written out.  If half of them can spell "aesthetic" by the end of the year I'll be very happy.

Fluid would have been another possibility too.  The app you download does nothing more than create other apps, each of which is a minimalistic web browser.  What's the big deal, you ask?

The big deal is that there's a ton of cool websites out there that are applications in and of themselves.  SUMOpaint, Google Docs, and more are all as good as or better than applications you can run on your computer.  If I create a SUMOpaint app, Twitter app, or whatever using Fluid, I can have a new icon in my dock that with a single click takes me right to that tool.

Not convinced this is a good thing?  Neither was I, at first.  But because Fluid apps are very minimalistic, they're also kinda light on the system requirements.  If I'm running something that's kind of resuource heavy on my computer, say... World of Warcraft, do I really want to open up a full browser just to check wowwiki.com?

If I have a Twitter account of my own and manage another Twitter account for a community, do I want to open up a whole other browser just to keep from logging in and out of multiple accounts?  Yeah, I could use one of many twitter apps, but I kinda like the background I have on my Twitter page.  I'd like to see that.

I won't be so enthusiastic as to say Fluid's posibilities are endless.  Clearly it has some limitations, but I see those same limitations as its strengths.

If you have another use for Fluid, why not post it as a comment?