FOSSwire

The web isn’t just about static web sites anymore. Web applications, like Google Docs, Gmail and many others, are extremely popular.

But confining an important application inside a browser window means that web applications feel like second-class citizens and can get lost amongst the browsing that you are doing.

Site-specific browsers (SSBs) are designed to solve this problem. The idea, as the name suggests, is to create a browser specifically for each of these applications. The web app then exists in its own window and has its own space on your desktop.

Prism is Mozilla’s site-specific browser offering. Prism is based on Firefox, sharing the Gecko rendering engine, meaning it should have excellent compatibility with even the fussiest of applications. Like Firefox, it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X natively.

There is both a Firefox extension and a standalone application available which allow you to create SSBs. With the standalone application, you simply launch it, enter the URL of the application you want to use (for example, Google Calendar would be https://www.google.com/calendar), set a few other settings and click OK.

And that’s it! You now have a site-specific browser for that app. It can exist alongside every other desktop application on your machine and feel like a real application, rather than just something that has to hide away in a browser tab.

The Firefox extension works in a very similar way, but makes it even easier. It adds an option to Tools > Convert Website to Application, so you can simply browse to the website in question, issue that command and create an SSB.

If you like working with applications in the cloud, but prefer to not have to live entirely in your web browser, site-specific browsers and Prism might be interesting to play with.

Continuing the recent trend of posts about email client and personal information manager (PIM) software, this post will look at the Lightning extension for Thunderbird.

Mozilla already make a standalone calendaring client called Sunbird, but what if you prefer having all of your information in one app, perhaps like GNOME's Evolution, but want to remain cross-platform (which is more difficult with Evolution)?

The Lightning extension brings Sunbird's calendaring functionality and places it into Thunderbird. Despite how cut-and-paste that may sound, it works rather well; you access the Calendar module from a switcher at the bottom of the sidebar.

The Lightning extension is available for all the platforms where Thunderbird can run. Linux users should first check their package manager for lightning-extension or similar (and beware that installing in this way will install it for all users).

Or, you can install it by browsing to the add-on page for Lightning in your web browser, downloading the extension and installing it into Thunderbird.

Once you've downloaded it from that page, go to Tools > Add-ons in Thunderbird, click Install and locate the downloaded file.

If you're a sucker for an integrated PIM solution, but want the universal platform flexibility that Thunderbird offers you, Lightning is an excellent solution for adding calendar into the mix.

As an added bonus, because Lightning is based on Sunbird, you can do cool things like, I don't know, direct access to Google Calendar with CalDAV.

Having a notification when new email arrives can be nice and really useful if you're waiting for an important message. But if you're using a desktop email client or maybe a third party webmail service, you might not want to run a big client application or have to keep checking that tab in Firefox to see if new mail has arrived.

Mail Notification is a small application that can run in your system tray area on GNOME (but it also runs fine on KDE, Xfce or pretty much any other desktop environment) that sits there and checks your account(s) for new email. If there's a new message, it notifies you and you can then open a full client to read it in.

This little app is more clever than its simplicity suggests. For example, if supported by your email service, it supports push email with IMAP IDLE so that it doesn't have to periodically poll the server and use up unnecessary bandwidth. It also supports lots of different account types.

It also has direct integration with Evolution, so it can check accounts that you have set up in the email client there without any further configuration. However, the Evolution support does require that Evolution is running in the background.

To install the application on Ubuntu, you can simply go to Applications > Add/Remove and search for mail-notification. You will also need fetchyahoo and getlive for Yahoo and Hotmail support.

On other Linux distributions, the install process will be similar. Once the application is installed, in GNOME you will find it under Applications > Internet.

You simply choose which type of account you want to configure (supported types include IMAP, POP, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail), enter the details and then let Mail Notification sit in the background until a message comes along.

As I said, Mail Notification is a very simple application, but it is especially useful in conjunction with a webmail-based email service. You can keep a check on your email without having to keep a browser tab dedicated to the email service open all the time.

Thanks to Adrian who pointed out this app in the comments to a previous post, noting its Evolution support.