TAKEO.ME

So laterstars got an awesome review from MacStories the other day, and in it Federico mentioned that it was a perfect candidate to use with Fluid.app to have a dedicated app open at all times like you would an RSS reader. I had been thinking about doing something with this eventually, but this spurred me on to seeing if I could bang it out real quick.

First off, I wanted to have the dock icon show the inbox unread links count, similar to an email or RSS app. Fluid provides a nice Javascript API for doing this type of thing, so I hooked up a quick way to get that count as JSON and created a MooTools class to start wrapping all this Fluid stuff up. Setting the badge count is easy, so that was done.

Obviously I have some links to check out.

Next, I knew that Fluid let you add custom dock menu items, so I added the main navigational items, as well as a quick way to log out.

Finally, I knew that Fluid had some way of letting you tell it what icon to use automatically. I did a bit of poking around and found the right link to put in the html head of all the pages. There were some early beta testers discussing a Fluid icon for laterstars, and @chrisherbert1 even made his own available for download, which was awesome. So I made one like his, just much larger since OS X supports gigantic icons.

Finally, to get the best use out of this set up, I made some tweaks to the app’s preferences. First off, I set it so it could browse to any URL, which is necessary to log in, as well as to follow the links within the app itself.

Finally, I tweaked the behaviors prefs to make all the links I click (or, actually, open with the ‘v’ key) open in a new tab within the Fluid app itself) by making the “Sites spawning new windows open in new tabs instead.”

That’s about it. Now, I have a dedicated laterstars app with my unread inbox count, a nice icon, that’s completely self-contained and always available. Hope you enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions!