Prism is a new side project by the Mozilla team. It’s a nifty way to run specific web applications in an embedded browser of sorts.
If you haven’t seen it yet, imagine a letterboxed web browser – all you see is the content. There is nothing else showing in the window – back/forward navigation buttons, location bar, status bar, all gone.
I’ve found a dozen uses for it, but I think my two favorites are embedded videos (like Chris Pirillo) and Google Reader.
Prism is available for all major platforms – Linux, Mac and Windows. It’s really simple, just install it (or unzip it) and open up the Prism progam, and fill out the information it asks for, like URL or Name.
Prism does not share cookies or any other settings with Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari. This is nice if you have separate accounts and don’t want to mix things up.
In Ubuntu 7.10, I setup a Widget Layer rule in Advanced Desktop Effects Settings (ccsm) to match all windows set to be “Always On Top” using the following rule: state=above This setting lets me easily toggle windows to be set as a widget (or not) by simply setting the window as “Always On Top” after right clicking the title bar. Really simple to setup, then just F9 by default to view the widget layer.
Here’s a screenshot of my current setup:
Do you use Prism or Widget Layer rules in a creative way? Let me know in the comments.