I stumbled into Fluid when I was looking for a way to keep my RememberTheMilk task list open on the side somewhere rather than always having a Firefox tab devoted to it (and trying to remember not to just close the Firefox window).  With Fluid, not only do I have an app dedicated to my RTM task list (and, since installing Gears into Safari^* makes it available to Fluid SSBs, it should have some ability to function offline, too), but I was able to create a separate menu-extra type app with the gadget interface to RTM so I can also access my task list quickly in the menu bar.

Having done that, it was a short skip over to having a proper Google Calendar app.  Nothing special there yet, save for the same hope that Gears will make it work offline.

More usefully, I found this post about using Fluid and Hahlo along with some scripting to create a pretty good Twitter client that even uses Growl notifications.  That post has all the links you need, including a direct link for the script and a link to a usable icon on Flickr.

Better still, it occurred to me tonight to apply Fluid to Lala.  With Fluid’s option to hide the window when the user closes it, rather than actually closing it, I can “close” the window that has Lala and it keeps playing.  If I go back to my Lala SSB app, the window pops right back up.

Mind you, while all this web-app-turned-mac-app stuff is nice, the biggest benefit is probably the fact that if my web-browsing browser crashes, it doesn’t take my web apps with it and no one of my web apps can crash the others.  Unfortunately, Webkit seems to share one big cookie jar among all its instances, so separate Fluid-created instances won’t allow you to simultaneously log into the same site using different credentials if you couldn’t already do so (the login cookies will clobber each other and/or any such Safari cookies… though Firefox’s cookie jar is separate from Webkit’s…).

^*note that, interestingly, the Gears site displays an essentially blank page with no help or guidance whatsoever if you have javascript turned off in Safari (I mast have been testing something or other without javascript and forgotten to turn it back on).

• This is the first thing I’ve ever written with Objective-C/Cocoa and the first OS X-native GUI app I’ve ever written. This is also the first release. There are probably bugs.
• The preferences have no default settings yet.
• The program won’t create the log file if it doesn’t exist.
• If you don’t have Growl, you will be prompted to install it at some point. Install it.
• The lookups to whocalled.us may make use of /usr/bin/curl, but I think that’s in the base install of OS X 10.4+
• Requires OS X 10.4+

When I learned about Network Caller ID (NCID), I knew it was exactly what I wanted. I’ve got an old, but caller-ID capable, modem in an old OpenBSD box and it grabs all the caller ID data and serves it up. The only thing left is to get that data to each machine.

I was very disappointed in the choices in NCID clients for OS X. I settled on using David LaPorte’s shell scripts that hook into the command-line tool for Growl notification. This worked pretty well. Annoyingly for me, I get calls about every half-hour during the day, six days a week, mostly from “Toll-Free” or “Out-of-Area” and my annoyance with not knowing who’s calling had led me to whocalled.us. I was able to use Maxim Samo’s junk_lookup.agi script to help me modify David LaPorte’s scripts so that now all my incoming calls were looked up on whocalled.us. This worked reasonably well.

I now had an AppleScript app on my desktop that ran the shellscript that started the command-line NCID client that triggered a shell script that used curl and some other voodoo to query whocalled.us and reprocess all that info into a log and into the command-line interface for Growl. If I were busy all the time, I wouldn’t have given this a second thought, since it worked. But what I really wanted was a single program with a nice little menu thing up by the clock that controlled it. So I learned some Objective-C and some Cocoa and here’s the result.