Want to have Wave as a standalone application, with a badge that reflects the number of unread waves?
Follow these steps:

1. Download the excellent Fluid.app

2. Run it and create a new application like this:

   

   Download the icon I used here and make sure to select it in the appropriate dialog dropdown.

3. Launch the application. When Wave loads for the first time, it’ll think you’re using an unsupported browser. This is not true, since Fluid.app is Webkit-based. Disregard this message and press continue. Google will remember this setting.

4. To get the badge count functionality, I developed this userscript. Unzip it, go to the Google Wave applications, find the plugins menu and click Browser Usersripts Folder. Drop the file there and then make sure it’s enabled.

   

5. One last useful setting for any Fluid.app you create is to make sure it doesn’t unload the website when you press ⌘ + W. Make sure only hides the window is checked:

   

As a Leopard user, I decided a long time ago that Safari would be my Internet browser, whereas Firefox would be my Development browser. The main reason for this was that Safari has historically had an extra care for the UI, which made it better as an everyday use mac application. Today I downloaded the new beta which takes this to the next level.

I’ll review the key new features of Safari 4 next.

Read more

If you’re an OS X user and a web developer, you know how difficult things can get to test your websites or scripts on Windows browsers. Some of the alternatives you might be familiar with are:

• Installing Windows XP and Parallels
• Installing Windows XP and VMWare Fusion
• Installing Darwine and IES4OSX

Each of them has its disadvantages. The first two involve purchasing software (and the OS, if you don’t have it), and the third can turn out to be slow, crash or provide a different browsing experience.

After watching the screencast by Jeff Couturier I finally achieved the cross-browser, cross-platform testing Nirvana. Here’s how

Read more