As of late, I have become a huge fan of Pandora.com. For those who do not know about Pandora, where have you been? Pandora lets you create your own radio station and add the artist you like, then Pandora does the rest by putting together a playlist of similar artists and styles. It works amazingly well! The only downside is you have to have a browser window open in order for Pandora to continue to run. (Something to do with the ads and copyrights, I guess.)
Well, for Mac users running Leopard, that’s where an application called Fluid comes in. Fluid lets you create applications for you dock out of web browser based applications. Things like Gmail, facebook, flickr, and Pandora can all be made into applications that sit nicely on your dock. This is a little bit from Fluidapp.com.
Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or Pandora fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site or Flash ad crashing your browser and causing you to lose your (say) Google Docs data in another tab?
If so, Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your WebApp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many, many other goodies.
Its super easy to set up, too! Here is a quick walk through for setting up a pandora.com application through Fluid.
First, go download fluid from Fluidapp.com.
After you install the application, open it up and the screen will look like this:
For the url type www.pandora.com/?cmd=mini
Name the Application: Pandora
Then you can choose the icon you want to use. I found some great icons here.
Add those and it should look like this.
Once you have all of that done, click “create.” Once you’ve created it, go ahead and launch the new application. It should launch the Pandora mini player inside a new window.
You can leave it like this and it works just fine, but you still have to leave it up and running in the background. To make this application a little more functional go to: File —>Convert MenuExtra SSB.
This turns the application into one that runs from the Menu Bar. You should have a new Icon in your menu bar that looks like what ever icon you chose. Mine looks like this:
Now you have Pandora running and you do not have to leave a application or browser window open. You will be able to click on the menu icon to bring up the application in order to thumb up, thumb down, and skip songs to your liking. The final result…
Pretty awesome if you ask me!
Dude, your such a Mac Geek!!!!!!!!! :)
this is really neat.
I have a random question though, jake… i want to scan some old pictures of my maw maw. I tried to plug in my printer and simply press scan, but the “scanned” pic does not come up on my mac, what do i need to do? I basically want to scan pics into my mac how do i go about doing this? you can email me if you need to:
shawnablonde86 [at] yahoo [dot] com
thanks
So since you have so much time to play on your computer….change my blog background!!!!!
I was beginning to wonder where the “Jake” in the “JakeAndDiana.com” was. Thanks for sharing your passion with us, Jake. I’m sure it’s very interesting. After about half way through the first sentence I started scrolling.
This weekend,I hope to have time to read and follow the directions. This sounds cool.
@Dave – Your just jealous cuz I can do cool things!
@Charlie – Glad I included pictures! :-)
@Jennie – soon enough, I am working on it.
@Mama – I am glad someone appreciates the random things I can do. :-)
Oddly, every time I fire up the Pandora app, it spawns a browser session as well. Anyone else experiencing this?
Other than that, works great!
Yeah for some reason I have been experiencing the same thing. I am not real sure why. I believe it might just have something to so with pandora, because the other apps I have created with Fluid do not do this. Its kind of annoying.
Glad all else worked out.
Mini URL doesn’t work for me either. I tried googling a solution with no luck.
Anyone else know how to do it?
Thanks
I wonder if they only let you do mini version with subscription?
yea i’m getting a browser session spawning as well….
mind sharing where you got those lovely hard drive icons? :D
I was looking for a better pandora icon for fluid and stumbled on this blog. Thanks for the SSB trick, takes it to the next level, geek in me just had an orgasm! :)