Getting Fluid with the Mac

In the past few months, I have attempted to simplify my life. We live in such a consumption culture that life is very overwhelming. Letting go of the unnecessary is important, but difficult. And that does not even take into account the increasing popularity of social media.

Part of my process has been to severely limit my time with email, facebook, twitter, and other social media platforms. That even includes blogging. To accomplish this, I wrote an applescript to open and close my email client and Seesmic, a twitter/facebook desktop client. Those scripts are scheduled by the power of iCal and have been wonderful in limiting my distractions.

While like some features of Seesmic, I really prefer the features of hootsuite.com. Unfortunately, they do not have a true desktop application. Neither does Facebook. So in the past, I had to be disciplined to close my facebook tab on my google chrome browser, as well as the google reader tab. With ADD, however, I often just forgot to close those tabs and found myself perusing those too much.

Yesterday, however, I found an application for the Mac called Fluid. Fluid allows you to turn any website into a Mac desktop application. So I turned hootsuite.com into the hootsuite app. Facebook.com has become an app for my Mac. The same for google reader. Now in my open/close script, I just add those apps to the script and they are scheduled as well. That gives me just less than 3 hours per day to spend time on email, social media, and reading blogs.

The program is incredibly easy. You put in the url, give the app a name, tell Fluid where you want to have the app created, and what icon you want to use for it. Click a button and almost immediately you get a notice that the app has been created. It also asks if you want to open it. Log in if necessary, and your facebook.app is there for you to use.

Best of all, Fluid is a free download.