* Bubbles hold Web sites
Here’s a cool idea: Encapsulate Web sites as if they were applications so that you can minimize them to the task bar, iconize them to the system tray (which also displays the icon used by the site), and when you right-click the icon in the system tray you get a context-sensitive menu that you can customize. In other words, each Web site becomes what you might think of as a pseudo-application.
This is precisely what 3D3R Software Studio’s Bubbles tool has done (Bubble’s motto is “Refreshing the Web”).
Once you’ve installed Bubbles you can assign any Web page to a bubble and specify whether it should open when Windows starts. And if you’ve installed the Gecko rendering engine (requires the installation of an ActiveX control) you can select that instead of rendering using the IE engine.
Bubbles behaves just like Web pages but without any menu bars so you must remember to use ALT-left and ALT-right to navigate if the pages don’t have forwards and backwards links (in fact you might consider framing pages with navigation controls and using those to navigate the target site loaded in the main window. A little AJAX might also go a long way …).
Bubbles also comes with developer support. The API is XML-based and embeds JavaScript so that you can manipulate the window contents and there’s even support for Greasemonkey type functionality.
Bubbles is currently free and definitely worth checking out – let me know what you think of it.
