Bubbles | The Site Specific Browser For Windows [Review]

Posted by ChaCha Fance on Jun 4, 2008 in Cool Tools Reviews, Desktop Applications | 0 comments

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Transform the web by integrating it with your natural working environment, the Desktop.

Your favorite web applications have been running in a Browser for too long. They’re trapped in tabs, crammed between a gossip column, driving directions and an image search for cats.

With Bubbles, your web-apps are only a click away. No more separation between your desktop and the web.

A Few Features:

Site-Specific Bubbles (SSB)
SSBs focus on making your frequently used sites more accessible. In Windows this means your SSBs are running all the time & are a click a way – on the system tray and are generally more lightweight and, well, just yummy.

Notifications
Notifications are an integral part of having a fluent user experience with your frequently used applications. Web applications have always had two issues that stopped them from providing users with this sort of experience. The first is that they aren’t always running – what if you don’t have a tab with GMail open right now. The second problem is that browsers don’t really let web applications to do much outside of the browser window itself.

Bubbles overcomes both of these problems, making it a fantastic platform to provide notifications with. Your important Bubbles are running all the time, so when new data flows in (e.g. new mail, new story, new bid) – the user can be notified. The second is an API for full HTML notifications letting Web applications popup fully customizable notification windows, the ones users have grown to expect.

Support for drag and drop of local files
Remember how dragging a photo into Picasa imports that photo into an album? Think for a second what happens when you drag that photo into a browser… right, the browser shows you that photo. Bubbles allows web-sites to accept files that are dropped on them, so the Flickr extension for Bubbles makes uploading new photos as easy as dragging them into the Flickr Bubble!

System tray icon and context-menu
The system tray icon can be changed in real-time to indicate different statuses (new email, awaiting chat message, etc). Right clicking the icon opens up a Context Menu which, just like with a Desktop application, allows you to quickly start actions (Compose mail, go to main page, See friend list, etc).