If you've ever wanted to run LiveTimer, or another site, more like a desktop application you may want to give a Site Specific Browser (SSB) a try. An SSB lets you use a web application like an installed application.

There are two options that I know of for this: Prism from Mozilla which runs on any platform supporting FireFox 3; and Fluid which runs on Mac OS X 10.5 and later.

On the Mac my preference is to use Fluid. I have Fluid apps created for LiveTimer, Pandora, and my web mail client. Fluid allows applications to show a small message called a Dock badge similar to how the Mac's Mail client shows unread messages. LiveTimer detects when you are using Fluid and displays the duration of the currently running timer.

To get started you need to have a Mac running OS X 10.5 or later. Install Fluid and launch it. It will launch an application which creates SSBs. To create your LiveTimer SSB you only need to enter two pieces of information. The first is your LiveTimer URL. This will be in the form of https://myaccount.livetimer.com, obviously replacing myaccount with your actual account name (copy this from a browser running LiveTimer). The second is a name Fluid will use when creating your application: LiveTimer is a good choice. Click Create and in a few seconds you will have a new application created. Click Launch Now and you can run it. Log into LiveTimer and you should be up and running. Use the "Remember me" option and on your next launch you can skip the login steps.

Are there any issues? There is one minor one that we've found, which is that Fluid doesn't alert our app that a page is unloading so we can't show you the option of saving your changes on an edit if you decide to switch pages. We're hoping the Fluid team will fix this soon.

If you don't have a Mac running OS X 10.5 you can give Prism a try. I'll write up how to use Prism in a future post.

UPDATE (July 26): We've added a video that demonstrates how to configure LiveTimer with Fluid.