From today’s On the Fastrack:

In addition to Winter ‘10 from the mother ship, a lot of good stuff has been happening this Fall in our little ‘ole Salesforce database. Best of all: we haven’t had to spend an additional penny for any of it, since it’s all about tools we were already using.

To me, this is what the cloud is all about. Different logins, different purposes, different data…all coming together to work the way we need it when we need it.

So what’s new?

• Convio released their own Fall ‘09 upgrade of Common Ground (to version 2.1)
• Formspring introduced Salesforce integration
• Box.net introduced Salesforce integration

All 3 solutions were easy to implement. Here’s a look.

Common Ground Fall ‘09 version 2.1

While I was still trying to figure out what we were going to do before switching to Convio Common Ground, I asked staff for their Salesforce wish list: “what do you wish our database could do that it doesn’t already?” Our Development Director answered that he wished he could enter a partial address and Salesforce would correct.

It was a great suggestion. There are tools on the Salesforce appexchange that do address verification, but they’re not free. Even DemandTools charges extra for their address verification service.

Last week, Convio released a free Fall ‘09 upgrade to Common Ground (to version 2.1) and it includes CASS address standardization!

There were other changes, including grant management workflow and improvements to the relationship widget. But the address standardization is the killer feature for me.

So let’s say we get an address like this (this is C3’s address, if anyone is wondering):

No zip code. And is that an apartment, suite or house number?

Each address now has a button to standardize, and the status is set to “Pending” whenever an address is edited. The address verification happens on Convio’s servers.

Click the button and viola! Corrected address. Full zip code, correct street address. The status is changed to “Standardized” on save.

This button works one address at-a-time, and there’s a bulk tool to update existing addresses.

It’s not perfect. In the day or two I’ve been playing with it I’ve found:

• It won’t work if the city field is blank (so no entering just the zip code to get the correct city)
• It won’t work if the state name is spelled out (Virginia instead of VA)
• It only works on the contact mailing address and account billing address (not account shipping address)
• I still have to figure out how or if I can add the button to address fields on custom objects (doubtful, given all the moving parts involved).

But better than paying for the service separately elsewhere? Definitely.

Formspring Salesforce Integration

We’ve had a Formspring account for a while. Way before we signed up with ClickTools which does forms and surveys right from within Salesforce.

Why Formspring? It’s relatively inexpensive. The plan we’re on gives us 20 forms to play with, each with up 200 fields and 2,000 submissions for under $20/month after nonprofit discount. It’s easy. The interface is a breeze to navigate, the results are simple to embed on any page and it’s reliable.

Until last week, the only downside was that I had to manually import results to Salesforce. Now, that’s no longer an issue.

Take for example this simple form on our site to capture interest in our upcoming Call-on Congress.

We just want to know if they want to be notified when we open registration. We ask for name, email and mailing address. Name and email are required.

I have a campaign in Salesforce/Common Ground for folks who have expressed interest in Call-on Congress. Makes it easy to mass email them when registration opens.

So manually, the process is that we need to bring in the contact, check if they already exist, update if they do, create if they don’t, and add them to the campaign.

Now Formspring does this for us. Within seconds of submission, that contact is in the campaign. Very easy to configure for each object.

Limitations I’ve found, especially as compared to the more expensive/complicated ClickTools:

• No conditional mapping. In ClickTools, I can update a field in Salesforce based on the value. So in the example above, we have an opt-out question. In Formspring, I can’t set it to “If the answer to this question is X, then update this field.”
• No customized upsert fields. In ClickTools, I can set whatever field I want to be the key field for an update. In Formspring, it can only be based on the email address (unless you happen to be capturing the ID from the user), which is fine if you’re sure that every email address is unique in Salesforce.
• No data in the URL. In ClickTools, we can send a constituent an email with a unique survey link that already has their contact and/or case ID embedded in the URL. So they can respond without having to tell us who they are again, and their record will be updated. Formspring doesn’t do anything like this. It’s only meant to replace public forms, not collect data in the way that ClickTools does.

Box.net Salesforce Integration

Salesforce wants an arm and a leg for their data storage solution. Even with the nonprofit discount. For our simple needs, Box.net works. The only downside is its lack of a desktop sync tool (a la Dropbox, which I also love).

Last week, Box.net introduced integration with Salesforce. I wish I could say I’m over-the-moon about it. It’s just alright.

Once installed (through a link provided by your account manager) you have to add a custom s-control to the page layout of the object you want. It really doesn’t matter which layout you put it on, because unfortunately it doesn’t really integrate with Salesforce. More on that later.

Once added to the page layout via a custom s-control, you get a view into your files exactly as they are on Box.net (sorry, had to black out file names).

And that’s the problem…it’s just Box.net inside of Salesforce. That’s not integration, that’s interface.

There are no options to specifically work with the file and the opportunity/contact at the same time. Best you can do is get the box.net shared link which you then have to copy/paste into an email.

No listing on the record of which collateral was sent, whether it was opened, etc. Oh, and you can add a Box.net tab to your Salesforce applications. When clicked, it’s Box.net in a Salesforce frame. Once again, this is interface. I was hoping for integration.

I guess it’s a matter of getting what you pay for, but I hope Box.net has plans to take this so much further. If I’m going to add something to an object’s page layout, it isn’t because I want convenience. It’s because there’s a reason that the added information needs to interact with that object.

See you at Dreamforce and Convio Summit next month!

I’m amazed that after all these years, no one has come out with a killer offline blog editor for the Mac yet. It seems like there’s more development energy going towards iPhone blog editors than desktop versions.

I really liked working in Windows Live Writer back when I was a fulltime Windows user. I loved that once configured, the editing window used your blog’s own style sheet so your typing appeared exactly how it would look on the blog. The problem was that the code was pure Microsoft: crap. Full of unnecessary tags and other junk that caused all sorts of problems. And I now only run Windows XP in VMWare Fusion when I absolutely have to.

As I see it, if you want to use an offline editor on a Mac you only have 3 choices, each with its own strengths and overwhelming weaknesses.

Ecto: This was my favorite editor for a long time. No WYSIWYG like in Live Writer, but fairly easy to switch between code and a rich text Word-like view. It had a great image uploader, very configurable, lean markup and lots of other tricks up its sleeve. Until the original developer sold his software to IllumineX and it all went to heck.

There’s a nasty little bug in the latest version where if you switch between the rich text and code view and delete the blank space at the top of the rich text view, your entire post disappears. Even if you saved a previous version. It’s just gone. It hit me a couple of times. Well-known knit blogger Stephanie Pearl-McPhee complains about it here. There’s a thread in the IllumineX support forums on it with no company response. Eric wrote to them about something else a week ago and has heard nothing back. This is not new behavior for IllumineX (different player behind the scenes, same song). Yes, I can revert to a previous version. But the writing is on the wall: RIP Ecto.

MarsEdit: It’s what I’m using to type this post. I have a love/hate relationship with MarsEdit. I love that its developer is still in the game, which is tons more than I can say about Ecto. It’s powerful and stable and has a lot of great features.

The problem with MarsEdit is its lack of a WYSIWYG or rich text editor. While you’re writing you have two screens: An editing window that shows the raw code that you’re typing in. And another that shows a preview of what the post will look like when posted that updates as you type in the editing window. You have to set this up for yourself by copying the source of a blog entry to a template editor and then replace the title, body, etc with placeholder tags. It would be wonderful if MarsEdit had a “Get Preview” button that did this for you once it has your blog URL.

Here’s what I’m looking at right now (for this example, I used Skitch for screenshot, uploaded to Flickr and then MarsEdit media editor which is connected to my Flickr account to insert):

I don’t mind it too much, but there are folks who are scared off by seeing code while they’re editing and would prefer the option for a cleaner view. If I want to edit the image’s size or alignment after I’ve placed it, I have to know the HTML to do it. Fine for me, not so much for my husband or colleagues.

Blogo: If MarsEdit errs on the side of being too geek, Blogo goes too far in the other direction. Eric has a license, so I tried it. Ran screaming mad away from it. Pretty, but so buggy! Very difficult to edit the code it decides your blog needs. I switched to HTML to make a change that the WYSIWYG wouldn’t do correctly, switched back to WYSIWYG and Blogo wiped out my change. Thanks. Finally, I don’t need a blog editor that’s also a Twitter client.

Any other options out there I should look at?

Like Christmas decorations before Halloween, Winter comes early to Salesforce customers. Winter ‘10 release is coming in early October.

The release notes are out (PDF).

Note: I get deep in Salesforce weeds again.

Campaigns:

In my opinion, the best upgrades in Winter ‘10 are in campaigns. Up until a few months ago, a person either responded to a campaign message or they didn’t. They donated (or purchased, for our friends in the for-profit world) or they didn’t. That was about it. Now, campaign membership is almost an opportunity unto itself, as you can customize someone’s membership with far more information than simply if they received or responded. Huge for member-based organizations. Makes the campaign object extremely powerful.

Last upgrade gave us the ability to add custom fields to campaign member records. Now we can create roll-up summaries on the campaign, and we can create record types for campaign membership. We use campaigns for so many purposes: Email, advocacy, events, straight fundraising. With record types we can customize the page layout depending on the type of membership. I like that I don’t have to pile on information to the contact record that’s much better served directly tied to the campaign. I think we’ll be using this one a lot.

Reporting and Analytics:

If there’s one area that we continually bang our head against our keyboards, it’s in reporting. It’s almost silly that we just got the ability to show percentages in pie charts on the last release, and now we finally have combination charts. This will allow us to plot multiple Y-axis values against a single X-axis. For example, we can see how much was donated month to month alongside a line count of how many new advocate sign ups we’ve had over the past year.

The way it worked before in a pie chart, if there were one or two records for a value (totaling less than 3% of the total) the dashboard would lump those together in a “Other” category. We had no control over that. Now that “feature” can be turned on and off for each chart. Cool.

There are many other charting enhancements, but these are the ones that stood out the most to me.

Org-wide email address in workflow rules:

Love this. I have workflow rules set up which notify contacts (if they request in advance) that a donation has come in to their campaign. That email appears to be from me, which I rather it didn’t. Likewise, when a case is closed the email asking the contact to fill out a feedback survey is “from” me. Now I’ll be able to set an org-wide email as the “from” address to avoid confusion when these emails go out.

Misc:

For formulas, Winter ‘10 introduces the ability to evaluate based on the lack of value, using new functions ISBLANK and BLANKVALUE. What these two functions accomplished was possible before using workarounds like looking at whether there were more than zero characters in a field to determine if it existed. Now the formula is more straight forward. And when formulas get complex we can finally add comments in the text to document what on earth we were thinking when we wrote them (also helps troubleshoot a complicated formula if parts can be commented out while testing).

And tucked way down on page 120 of the release notes is another one that made me smile: custom field-level help text on standard fields. The hover help text has been great on custom fields to explain to users what data is expected in a field. But the fact that I can now use the help text to remind folks that the “close date” (a required, standard field) needs to be the date the check will be deposited and is not today’s date unless it’s going to the bank today will be very helpful indeed.

I’m intrigued by the ability to filter lookups. Lookups are the link between different objects. Before, if you had a contact lookup field on a record, you could link any old contact to that record which may not make sense depending on the business process. For example, if it’s something having to do with patient interaction, you would want to make sure only contacts you’ve designated as patients could be selected. Now those filters can be set up. Unfortunately, by Salesforce’s own admission this feature will be limited at first. You couldn’t filter on contacts if they belonged to a certain account, for example. You can only filter using criteria found in the object itself (or based on the user doing the asking).

What I want here in lookups is a button that says “Show All” that lists all the available records based on the filter selection. The way it is now, you have to know what you’re looking for before you can search for it. Fine if it’s a contact name, but if it’s a value such as a product name where it could be spelled any number of ways it gets frustrating. Maybe next time. If you agree, here’s an idea to vote up.

Conclusion:

I skipped over a ton of updates for Content and Mobile, neither of which we subscribe. Also updates in Sites and Apex/Visualforce, which I don’t understand enough to use without a lot of help.

Overall, what I’m looking forward to most aren’t wiz bang changes. As far as development changes go, I can’t wait to see what the folks at Convio can do for Common Ground with this update. A lot of the changes aimed at the Administrators are more along the lines of “duh! What took you so long, Salesforce?” But good nonetheless.

What am I missing?

If I knew that I could make the switch from the old Salesforce nonprofit Starter Pack to Convio Common Ground in less than 6 weeks, I would have made this move months ago.

Yes, it was time consuming, but not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. I ended up using just under 7 billable hours of consulting support time. Now it’s just about tweaking little things that may not work right, and figuring out where we’ll need some Apex or VisualForce to smooth rough edges. Other than that, we’re fully up and running.

Here’s another techie-geeky and “won’t be interesting to you if you don’t know Salesforce” post… promise I’ll keep them more general in the future.

It’s been a welcome relief to break our dependence on the very limited Opportunity Contact Role to link contacts to their donations. When we receive a gift from ABC Corporation, it’s ABC Corporation that should be credited, not just John Smith who is our primary contact at ABC Corporation. When we receive a gift from Steve and Sally Smith, we need to know whether we should be crediting the family or just the individual. It was always a struggle before differentiating when a gift was from an organization or entity, and when it was from a single person. Now it’s much easier.

The best part of the switch is how much better it is to run reports. For 95% of the reports we need on transactions, we can select “Donations” or “Accounts and Contacts” as the sole report type. Everything we need to know is right there, giving us a look at our data that was such a pain to get before.

if anyone is thinking of making a similar transition, here’s some lessons I learned along the way:

Test, test, test: It’s a little disarming to not understand what will happen when a record is created or saved because you can’t see the code in the managed package. I spent a good two weeks using our real data to beat up on Common Ground, until I was confident that I could anticipate what would happen on every kind of import. David Cheng at Idealist Consulting suggested that I handle the migration this way and he was right.

I had to come up with some workarounds to make Common Ground behave the way we want it to. For example, I added an extra record type and workflows around eCommerce, to account for the fact that we sell merchandise on our website and need to track those transactions in a very different way. I also added fields to Campaign records that I could then easily push to the Opportunity using formulas on linked campaign donations.

By the time I was importing real data for the final time, I knew it would all fall into place and it did.

DemandTools Rocks: I knew this already, but wow, did I develop an even deeper appreciation for how wonderful and powerful this tool is. The good folks at CRM Fusion give this utility away to nonprofits. So grateful. There are things that DemandTools can do that the Salesforce Data uploader can’t touch. For example, there were times that I would be 3/4 of the way through carefully mapping 50 fields for an import and then realize that I missed something in the original Excel file. DemandTools let me save the configuration as a “scenario,” go back to Excel to make the necessary changes, and then reload the Excel file and the saved scenario and pick up right where I left off. Major time saver.

Ask Salesforce to lift restrictions on audit fields: When you import records to a new instance of Salesforce, the “created” and “last modified” dates are the dates that the record was created/modified in this instance of Salesforce. So years of data all with date that the records were imported. Not ideal. I could live with this on donations, where we report around “close date,” but not in Cases where everything hinges on the date the case was opened.

Salesforce will temporarily enable the ability to upload created dates, but only if you ask them by opening a support ticket. I opened a ticket on a Friday, and Salesforce enabled the fields I needed the following Monday. They turned this feature on for 2 weeks, which was plenty of time to get everything in.

Ask Salesforce to increase API limits: Anyone who was ever locked out of Twitter from a desktop client can relate to this one. Accessing Salesforce from an external application is not an all-you-can-eat buffet. Salesforce distributes API calls on a scaled basis, which for nonprofits on a basic grant like we are works out to 5,000 API calls allowed in a 24 hour period. This is typically fine for us, and I never ran into a problem with this in the 3 years before. But Common Ground requires uploads to happen in very small batch sizes. The smaller the batch size, the more calls to the server. I quickly hit the API limit.

Bad news is that I was locked out of uploading data for nearly 24 hours. Good news is that I asked Salesforce for a temporary bump up in API calls (from 5,000 to 50,000) until data migration was complete, which they granted. Never had a problem again.

I submitted a Salesforce Idea that they should just assume new organizations need more API calls temporarily to get data imported and not force organizations to hit the wall before asking for an increase.

Looking forward to working on something else for a while.

It’s been a little over a month since I signed on the dotted line for Common Ground, Convio’s Force.com application for nonprofit donation and constituent management.

Here’s a little update on how it’s going.

I signed on with Idealist Consulting to support me in this project, and so far I’m pleased to say that I haven’t had to use as many hours with them as I thought I would.

Between them and Convio, I feel like we’re in good hands. Convio support has been excellent, and I’m learning a great deal through good old fashioned trial and error. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that I’ve put in about 175 of my own hours on the project so far getting everything configured and tested with our actual data. Summers are typically quiet for us, there’s no better time.

If all goes well we’ll be starting to use Common Ground day-to-day as early as next week.

So far, I think we made the right decision.

Last week, Convio updated their managed packages to version 2.0. It took me about 20 minutes to update our Salesforce instance to use all the new code, from start to finish. The new version includes Event and Volunteer management which we won’t use right now, but looks interesting for the future.

There are so many smart little touches throughout the application. For example, when you add a contact to a campaign, and a donation comes in linked to that campaign from that contact, the contact’s member status in the campaign is automatically changed to “Responded.” Seems like a no-brainer, but that isn’t the default behavior, and without knowing how to code an s-control or Apex trigger, it’s not as easy to set up as it sounds.

Salesforce default is to assume nothing, leaving it to the organization to customize things to their liking. Common Ground takes the framework that Salesforce provides and makes it truly usable for a nonprofit. Donations are named consistently. Users are forced to think about dupes before entering a new contact. Nearly every field has clear help text.

Other things that seem to make Common Ground worth it (above basic Salesforce):

• Tributes: Nearly 70% of our donations from individuals are in memory or honor of someone. There a number of ways that Convio has set up this functionality that make a lot of sense.
• Very intelligent handling of Household contacts/accounts. In Common Ground 2, you can set a one-time formula for household salutations and greetings. Makes mail merges so much easier. Much easier to report on giving/activity for a household and credit a household with a gift.
• Batch entry. When our office gets a bunch of checks, they either have to enter them one-at-a-time or put them in a spreadsheet for me to import. Common Ground has a clever batch entry interface for uploading gifts all at one time.

Only downside so far: There is so much code in Common Ground, that imports/deletes have to be set to very small batch sizes in the data loader. Convio docs recommend a batch size of 5(!!) for donations. I find I can get away with setting it at 15-20. That means that the software uploads 20 records, chews on them, uploads the next batch, chews on them, etc. etc. Imagine uploading a spreadsheet with thousands of records. Gets painful. Even worse because DemandTools won’t tell you right away if there’s an error. It will process all 18000 records and then after it’s dealt with them 20 at-a-time it will report that every single record failed because you stupidly forgot to link one required field. Reminds me of when I working for an ad agency in 1992 doing Photoshop on a Mac II. Set a filter, get a smoke, come back, click a button, get a drink, come back, click a button, grab another smoke. Rinse. Repeat.

Thankfully, you don’t feel Common Ground’s size nearly as much when working in the browser in regular use. Convio folks are more than aware that their dreams for Common Ground are a little bigger than Salesforce limits will let them be at the moment, and I’m told they’re working on strategies to make this processing a little less cumbersome.

Riding the DC metro to my office in Alexandria, VA this morning, I was struck by an ad on the yellow line train to King Street:

It says “A lot could be happening while you’re sitting there reading this.” and it’s an ad for Capitalert.gov which sends emergency alert messages in the Washington, DC area via email or SMS.

According to their website, the service provides alerts for:

• Major emergencies, like terrorism or natural disasters
• Severe weather
• Severe traffic
• Amber alerts
• School and government closings

The ad seems to imply that if disaster strikes and you’re sitting on the Metro, you won’t know about it until it’s potentially too late.

All well & good, except one catch:

A lot of the DC Metro system is underground, and when it’s underground there’s no AT&T cell service (only Verizon works in the tunnels, to the relief of many a Blackberry-addicted Hill staffer).

Let’s cry for all those clueless iPhones.

I’m sitting here on the train to DC, skimming the 1,000 or so posts and analysis about Google Chrome OS. My opinion: This OS may eat into some Linux market share, but Apple and Microsoft have nothing to worry about yet. Why? Because it will not gain mainstream adoption. Why not? Because Google is not taking customer service seriously enough to support a mainstream operating system.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope when Google Chrome OS is introduced that Google has a team that will directly respond to user issues and won’t depend entirely on the hardware partners to support the software (just try asking AT&T a software question about the iPhone – ’nuff said). I’m just not hopeful based on the company’s track record in this area.

Have you ever tried to get direct support for a Google product? For most products, it doesn’t exist. You are directed to the various forums that Google employees rarely post to. When you search for your issue among the posts, you typically find nothing but posts from others with the same issue but no solutions. Occasionally you may be lucky to find your issue among the “known” ones listed in Google’s Help Center.

For example, I blogged about a problem with Gmail rendering back on June 19th. Check out this thread on the Google support forums, full of folks begging for an update from Google. Nothing from a Google employee since a “we’re working on it” post on June 23rd. Last week I kept getting an error message when I manually added an email address to a Google group. Once again, found many threads. No solutions. Was it something related to the group I was on? Was it a computer issue? Was it a known problem? No idea. No way to find out.

When you rely on Google, you are also relying on the wisdom of the masses to help guide you. Most of the time, that’s good enough. Can’t check email and you run to Twitter search to confirm that others are having the same problem. You have to count on the fact that whatever problem you’re having is also experienced by enough others that it will get Google’s attention to fix, especially if enough folks kvetch about it in public places (or you can get an A lister to blog about it). I’m sure there are Google products where one can obtain one-on-one support, but they aren’t the products that are aimed at consumers.

But Judi, isn’t all your email on Google servers? Don’t you use AdSense, AdWords, Feedburner, Analytics, gCalendar, and Docs? Yes. But for each and every Google service I use I have a backup plan. I can pick up and move elsewhere with a stroke a DNS entry. Also the chance of every service failing at the same time is slim enough that it doesn’t concern me.

But an OS is different. It’s a single point of failure that everything else in your online day depends on. If the OS on your netbook fails and you can’t start the machine, you can’t search user forums hoping for a clue. You can’t easily fall back on something else. For the techie-geek who runs Linux and open source software as a general rule, this is not a huge concern. But the average user isn’t the techie-geek. The average user is going to want to pick up the phone at the first error message when they can’t get online.

Is Google ready to offer a page like this?

The support doesn’t have to be free (and probably shouldn’t be). It just has to be an option. Let the user decide for themselves if the dedicated help is worth paying for. Referring everything to partners is not a solution I think the average user will swallow.

Folks are waxing poetic about CompuServe,now that news has broken that the classic service is shutting down for good (like anyone really noticed until they announced it).

Brings back so many memories of my old Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie and Delphi accounts. Eric and I didn’t meet online, but those online services were a big part of our courtship. Remember when there was no spam? When the only online predators we had to worry about were the services themselves that charged us by the second? The so-called “connected web” we live in today isn’t a new concept. Some of the most meaningful friendships of my life came out of GEnie or CompuServe at a time when Facebook’s most active users didn’t know how to write yet.

I just spent 30 minutes looking for screen shots to go with what I’m describing in this post. I might as well be looking for examples of written language before ink.

For me, it started with my first Prodigy account in 1987. At the time, Prodigy and its flat monthly fee was a gateway drug for the casual user to move to GEnie, CompuServe and Delphi. CompuServe was too expensive and intimidating so I settled on GEnie pretty quickly. It was a bear to get around in the command line at first, but the conversations were much richer. Just complicated enough to keep out the casual consumer, but easy enough that you could figure it out if you kept at it.

GEnie was a mix of flat rate and pay-per-minute use. A lot of the site’s forums (roundtables) were free within the monthly charge, but anything gaming or chat was billed at a rate that only got as low as $6/hour during off-peak hours. I somehow managed to avoid the expensive areas of the site for years.

I don’t remember how or why, but early in 1992 when I started earning a respectable-for-the-time salary, I wandered in to NTN Trivia on GEnie (now the company is called Buzztime). For $6/hour on evenings/weekends, you could play a text-based multi-player trivia game. The same game was played in bars across the country. The top scorers of each game would get points. You accumulated points that you could trade in for prizes.

I wasn’t very good at the trivia on my own because I sucked at any question that required use of the left side of my brain. With careful budgeting, I only spent an average of $200-300 month. I never told my parents about that month I racked up a $750 bill. Took me a few months to quietly pay it off. Thank goodness I was working.

Shortly thereafter in mid 1992, I met Eric at a party. When we started dating, we quickly made a great team on NTN. He got all the geography, science and math questions. I got all the pop culture, lifestyle and art questions. We both had to WAG (wild ass guess) on the poetry. Playing together using the screen name JUDERI, the winning points started to add up.

We could trade in points for free time on the system, which we used to play in marathon sessions on some weekends (were living together in Queens, NY by this point). We’d start early and play until late evening, taking shifts, watching movies in the background and ordering in dinner. Some of the prizes we won over the next year or so included color televisions, printers, hard drives, $100 Amex gift certificates, and hats/t-shirts. It’s amazing we found time to work and plan a wedding.

GEnie had a primitive GUI for PCs called Aladdin that I couldn’t use from my Mac. Eventually, they introduced a Mac version of Aladdin, which was beyond awful but I accepted a position as moderator of the support forums for the product simply because with it came free access to all of GEnie. That disqualified us from winning any more prizes on NTN, which took most of the fun out of it.

Eric and I also played competitive backgammon on GEnie, but we were never as successful at that as we were at the trivia games.

How did I not know how wonderful this was before? It’s not like it just came out yesterday. And it’s free!!

Fluid is an application you can use to create Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) on the Mac based on the Safari rendering engine (WebKit). The author freely admits that the concept was inspired by Mozilla Prism, which does something similar for Firefox and its rendering engine, Gecko. As well as Adobe AIR which brings its own tricks to the party beyond just duplicating a browser.

The beauty of a browser like Google Chrome is that each tab runs in its own space in memory. If a web app misbehaves, you can shut down that tab and free up its resources without bringing down the whole browser. Fluid brings a similar concept to the Mac in an oh-so-elegant way that relieves most of the pain I had in switching from Firefox to Safari.

As a matter of fact, I tried the latest Firefox release candidate the other day and found that I still prefer Safari for day-to-day use. Fluid-created SSBs make the experience near perfect for me.

It’s simple. When you launch the application you just tell it which page should now be treated as a stand-alone application.

You can use the icon from the page’s website, or point it towards a PNG file of your own. So far, I’ve created SSBs for my task manager (RTM), my 2 main Google email accounts, my timesheet & expense application (Clicktime), Salesforce, Convio Admin, Box.net, and my feed reader (Fever). Convio in particular is tons faster running as a SSB than it is in any browser. You can tweak the behavior of each SSB in preferences, controlling its layout, tab behavior & navigation.

This is way more than a simple desktop shortcut for getting to a website. I no longer have to be concerned about keeping my mail tabs accessible in Safari. They’re always open and not in the way of my other browsing. Even better, I can delete the cache of any SSB without affecting the cache of other pages.

Here are some other features that I am loving:

Apps can have dock badges! This is killer. There’s a Javascript API for developers to add this functionality. Unread indicators for Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Facebook are built in to Fluid. So I was easily able to create separate SSBs for both of my main Gmail email accounts, using images for the icons that help me tell them apart. If I had any feeds set to show unread counts, I’d see that in the Fever icon, too:

Support for userscripts.org. It’s kind of like Greasemonkey for WebKit/Safari. I can’t use the Better Gmail extension I loved from Firefox, but I can easily add some of the scripts (not all work) to my mail browsing experience in their SSB. Proceed with caution here and only install scripts you know/trust. Some can be nasty/dangerous. There are some specifically designed to add the necessary Javascript code for dock badges in Fluid.

Turn a web app into a MenuExtra. You know, those little icons at the top of the screen? There are some web apps that you want accessible no matter where you are, rather than breaking your concentration and switching to a completely new application. Simply select “Convert to MenuExtra SSB…” from the application menu. Of course, you wouldn’t want a big honkin’ screen to pop up there, so I think it’s better to use mobile interfaces. I use it for Remember the Milk, using their iPhone view. On second thought, it’s much better to use the Google iGadget for RTM

Anyone else using Fluid and have any tips & tricks to share with me?