Tuesday, April 18th, 2006
Pyro: An example of a site specific browser
Pyro is an example of an application that blurs the lines between a rich application and an ajax application.
Pyro embeds WebKit on OS X (which is very easy to do, enabling these applications nicely) to offer a rich experience on top of 37 Signals Campfire chat application.
Why would you want to do this? What if you want a dock icon to bounce when a message comes in, or show you how many messages are there, or do a good job at alerting you in other ways (e.g. could intergrate with Growl). Pyro does those things that a pure web application can not.
This isn’t the first of these hybrids. Apple iTunes itself is kind of like this. A rich shell around a web engine. But iTunes doesn’t offer a pure ajax application to go with it.
When’s xulrunner going to be generally available again? XUL would need some decent desktop integration, to get the “bouncing dock icon” eye candy though.
XULRunner (there is already a developer preview out) will be released at the same time as Firefox 2.0 (estimated early Q3).
[...] Found on my RSS reader: Pyro is an example of a site specific browser. It may seem to be a new invention, but it isn’t. About three to four years ago, we (a team of a Belgian website) already had a “site specific browser” for our website. Of course, we aren’t talking about AJAX applications, but it could be used to access the phpBB powered forum we had at the time. However, the Delphi based application didn’t work very well and wasn’t very popular, so the idea and the browser vanished. It’s nice to see this idea reinvented years later. [...]
Colloquy, an IRC client for OS X, embeds WebKit as well. It offers the ability to build chat display themes using XSLT, XHTML, and CSS.
[...] Qualcuno ha fatto un applicazione che in pratica è un browser e si interfaccia a pennello, calza, un singolo sito web. Le chiamano site-specific browsers. Nello specifico l’applicazione si chiama Pyro, e ne ho letto su Ajaxian. [...]
Another very nice example is the PIM/CRM “Elements” web app by Ntractive - using their Elements Browser to get a dock icon for the app.
iTunes doesn’t actually use WebKit or anything like it. The iTunes Music Store data received is XML, but not anything like HTML.
I’m looking for someone to develop a browser based app, please contact me at davede @ (google’s email domain, you know it!).com
thanks,
dave
http://designisfuel.com