Although there are many new applications that are built as web apps., native Cocoa applications still provide the best user experience on Mac OS X.

Fluidium can wrap your existing web app in a pure, native Mac application shell to provide the best of both worlds to your demanding user base.

It is based on the same open source technology that powers the popular Mac OS X Site Specific Browser: Fluid (which was discussed here).

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As web designers/developers, desktop applications are harder to create considering they have a totally different environment.

In order to fill this gap, we can make use of site-specific browsers which enable us to lock a website inside an application-looking browser that can interact with the system tray/dock & display notifications.

Some usage examples for site-specific browsers:

• displaying new orders, support tickets for an e-commerce website
• showing system tray alerts when a new visitor visits your website
• or even locking your whole application inside a site-specific browser and offering it as a desktop application.

To sum up, they simply help us convert a website into a desktop application. Here are free & mature tools for creating site-specific browsers:

Mozilla Prism (Win-Mac)

Prism is a very easy-to-customize tool that supports Windows & Mac.

Applications created can be:

• minimized to system tray/dock & a navigation can be added there
• set to display status messages & popups in the system tray/dock

Prism apps. will be running seperately from the browser & will stay alive even if the browser isn't.

P.S. You can also read a more detailed post about Prism at WRD.

Fluid (Mac)

Fluid enables you to create Cocoa desktop applications with:

• dock icon
• standard menu bar
• growl notifications
• Userscripting (Greasemonkey)
• & more..

Bubbles (Win)

An application platform for creating site-specific browsers which supports:

• system tray icon & context menu
• notifications
• drap'n drop of local files
• & more..

Mango (Win)

Mango can create a website-to-application instantly with features like:

• custom tray & context menu
• minimize to tray
• always on top
• kiosk mode
• fixed width/height
• & more..

All application settings are kept in a XML file which can be used for further customization.

Other Site-Specific Browser Methods:

• Curl offers EmbeddedBrowserGraphic to accomplish this functionality.
• Using Adobe AIR, it is possible to create site-specific browsers (a simple example).
• Site-specific browsers with WebKit.

Further Resources:

There are also other ways of creating desktop applications with web scripting technologies like:

• Wapache: Apache server & IE bundled to create portable dynamic apps.
• Appcelerator Titanium: create desktop apps. with HTML, CSS, Javascript as well as Flash and Silverlight (see WRD post).
• Roadsend PHP: a platform for converting PHP apps into EXE files. (see WRD post)

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What is Paymo?

Paymo is a very functional application for anyone (whether you're a "one-man-army" or a "team that works on same/different projects") for tracking the time that is worked on projects>tasks, analyze that time & bill your clients accordingly.

How does it work?

Users:

First thing to do is creating users (the application is totally free for up to 3 users). Considering every user may have different conditions, it is possible to set variables like workday length, timezone, week start day, etc for every user.

Clients:

It is necessary to define clients (this can be yourself for your own projects) in order to create the projects. This info is also used in the invoices.

Projects > Tasks:

That's the heart of the application, yet very simple to define & use.

Projects can be created by defining the details like: the client, budget hours, price per hour & users that will work in the project. After that, tasks can be created which are the main things that the application tracks the time of.

Tracking the time:

Time can be tracked in 3 ways:

• web-based pop-up
• desktop client/widget (Windows, Mac & Linux supported)
• mobile time tracking using Paymo2Go

By simply start-stopping the tracker, the time worked on the selected tasks are added automatically. The tracker can also work offline if Google Gears is installed.

It is always possible to manually add/edit/delete the time worked on.

Invoicing:

The invoices can be created instantly by using the time that is worked on a project & that projects's hourly rate.

It is also possible to manually add entries that doesn't exist in the timesheets which makes Paymo an independent billing app. as well.

In order to keep record of the invoices, every payment made can be added to the system & the balances of every invoice can be seen with a click.

Reporting & analysis:

The application has a powerful reporting module that makes it possible to generate ready-to-use or custom reports. The data can also be exported as PDF or CSV files for future analysis.

API

For anyone willing to integrate Paymo into any other application, that's pretty easy with a complete API that supports almost every feature of the application.

Conclusion

The best thing about Paymo is the simplicity it offers. On every step, it takes no more than a few seconds to complete a task (add an entry, get a report, etc.).

Another one is the application supporting multi-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) & multilanguage that makes it suitable for teams that are distributed around the world.

Also, it has a free version that works up to 3 users & 3 invoices/month which can be ideal for many freelancers or small businesses.

Have any questions to Paymo?

Besides reaching them using the standard ways, the friendly team at Paymo is ready to answer your questions via their Twitter account:@paymo.

How to win the "Lifetime Invoice Accounts"?

Paymo is giving away 20 "Lifetime Invoice Accounts" which enables you to generate unlimited invoices & normally worth $9.99/month.

***UPDATE – 1*** (October 8th)
As the 20 lifetime accounts have just been requested, Paymo is giving away an extra 50 "3-months-free Invoice Accounts".

***UPDATE – 2*** (October 9th)
Paymo mentioned that the upgrades to the accounts will be activated today .

***UPDATE – 3*** (October 9th)
There are still 20 "3-free-month invoice accounts" that are not requested yet. Just comment with your subdomains to get them.

***UPDATE – 4*** (October 23th)
The giveaway is officially over with all the accounts being requested.

In order to win these upgrades:

• Sign-up for a free account
• Mention your subdomains as a comment to this post besides any other comment you may have (comment format such as "subdomain=xyz.paymo.biz" will make things much easier)
• And, first 20 commenters with their subdomains mentioned get the lifetime account upgrades and the next 50 commenters with their subdomains mentioned get the 3-month account upgrades

Good luck to everyone.

P.S. Comments are moderated & may not appear instantly.

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What is Fanurio?

Fanurio is a beautiful software with an intuitive interface for easily tracking time that is spent on projects & billing them accordingly.

It is possible to define projects & sub-tasks. Then, the time worked on the projects can be tracked manually or with the help of a timer.

For teams, everyone can install Fanurio to their computers, track the time and export/import reports easily.

Create the invoices

From the moment you get a new contract until you are paid in full, Fanurio offers you the right tools to manage and bill all your work down to the penny.

It covers almost any billing feature you may need like rounding time "up, down or to the nearest specified interval" or applying discounts & more.

Analyze the performance

Fanurio helps analyzing the perfomance with the reports it generates:

• payments: see all your open, un-paid invoices
• timesheet: time recorded on a certain period, by project or client
• project reports: howmuch money you made, howmuch money is unpaid, etc.

Also, reports can be exported to CSV or Excel for further analysis.

Fanurio works on Windows, Mac or Linux & doesn’t require purchasing new licenses when switching OSs.

And, the winners:

Here they are:

• Matt (comment #75715)
• Pritish Nandi (comment #75810)
• christian (comment #77066)
• GeeniUss (comment #75715)
• paul rostorp (comment #76381)

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining this giveaway.

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Details on "how to winning them" can be found at the bottom of the post. But before that:

What is Fanurio?

It is a well-thought software, with an intuitive interface, which can track the time that is worked on a project & help billing that job with almost no effort.

Track your time

The software enables you to define projects & sub-tasks. Then, the time worked on the projects can be tracked manually or with the help of a timer which also has a few reminders to help you start, resume or stop it automatically.

For teams, everyone can install Fanurio to their computers, track the time and export/import reports easily.

Create the invoices

From the moment you get a new contract until you are paid in full, Fanurio offers you the right tools to manage and bill all your work down to the penny.

It covers almost any billing feature you may need like:

• when billing by the hour, you can round time "up, down or to the nearest specified interval"
• apply discounts as a percentage or as a fixed value
• price and units can be entered using two or three decimals for a better accuracy
• for working with foreign clients, it can handle multiple currencies

If you are subcontracting some of your work or if you are reselling some goods, you can also enter the purchase cost to know exactly how much you are making. Also, any other item like expenses for a project can be mentioned as well.

Unlimited number of taxes can be defined & certain clients can be marked as tax exempt.

You can see a snapshot of the invoices (which ones are paid, unpaid or overdue) instantly. For unpaid invoices, you can see how much was paid and the remaining balance.

Any type of custom invoice designs can be created & if desired, it can auto-number the invoices when creating them.

Analyze the performance

Fanurio helps analyzing the perfomance with the reports it generates:

• timesheet: time recorded on a certain period, by project or client
• project reports: howmuch money you made, howmuch money is unpaid, etc.

Also, reports can be exported to CSV or Excel for further analysis.

Fanurio works on Windows, Mac or Linux & doesn’t require purchasing new licenses when switching OSs.

How to win the licenses?

Commenting to this post is enough to join the giveaway & winners will be selected randomly via the query below on 23 September 2009 (1 week later).

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=1166 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5

Good luck to all : ).

P.S. You can evaluate the product by downloading the trial version.

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XRefresh is a solution, specifically built for easing this process, which automatically refreshes browsers once an update to a file in our project folder is done.

It comes with 2 parts: a browser plugin (both for Firefox & IE) and an application (for Windows & Mac) which watches the changes made in the folders we mentioned.

Although it is handy for systems with one monitor, the best environment will probably be two monitors where the IDE & the browsers runs on each.

P.S. For Firefox, it requires Firebug to be installed.

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It is a very easy-to-use tool that simply asks you which URL to wrap, whether to sit on the system-tray and creates a shortcut for the new application. Once clicked, the URL mentioned runs in a desktop application.

With the help of a scripting support, developers can add events to their web applications to trigger actions like displaying system-tray notifications or popups.

It allows you to style (overwrite the default styles) the web application via CSS.

Prism also offers more customization options like enabling you to choose the icon for the application to be created, whether the navigation bar or navigation keys will be displayed & more.

It comes in two flavors:

• as a Firefox extension
• as a desktop application

Prism can run both on Windows & Mac OS X.

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It can also provide Mac-friendly outputs with:

• Coda clips
• Textmate bundles
• Menu bar app.

Several types of content is provided like:

• Long-medium paragraph, one sentence
• Unordered list – short/long items
• Ordered list – short/long items
• And a combination (with extras).

One feature that would be great is the possibility to switching to the "design-view" (although presenting the HTML is the main aim).

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