jorge's stompbox

Other ways to integrate with web apps

Whilst we wait for chromify-osd to go through the Chrome App web store process I thought I’d point out some other ways where we could integrate Unity with the web. Here’s what my current New tab looks like in Chrome:

There are applications I’ve installed. And yeah, Jason Odoom has made a Launchpad application in the Chrome Web Store. Cool huh? 

However it doesn’t make sense to me that I have applications in my browser, it’s kind of too … bookmarkesque. Too many of these “html5 apps” are just fancy bookmarks. Here’s what I really want:

When I bookmark a web app, I want it in my launcher. (Or whatever your OS provides). And then when I click it, I want a full blown application:

Note how the Seesmic shortcut launches the web app in Chrome application mode. Clicking on those links spawn another browser process, no weird new tabs interfering with the web app. It behaves like a totally separate application.

This is just a sandboxed version of seesmic.com/app. No adobe air, no dealing with pesky OS installation garbage, just my application. That’s all I want.