Google+ is already popular, and it isn’t yet showing any signs of slowing down. If you’re already in, or if you’re eagerly awaiting an invite, there are a few ways you can improve the experience when accessing Google’s new social network from Mac and iOS devices.

Mac

Create a Google+ Mac app with Fluid. Earlier this week I talked about the newest version of Fluid, which lets you create full-screen web apps for Lion using specific websites. Even if you don’t have Lion, Fluid is a great way to create a Google+ application that looks and feels more like a native Mac app than a website. You can even grab a nice Google+ icon to use with your Fluid app, like this one from deviantart user KillaAaron.

Better interaction with bookmarklets and extensions. You can change how Google+ looks and how it behaves with custom extensions for Chrome and other browsers. Go2Web20 has a great list of some of the best tools out there. One of the best is a +1 extension that lets you save any web page you come across to your +1 list in Google+, but that specific link on the Go2Web20 site is currently broken, so check out this similar option from the Chrome web store instead. If you’re not using Chrome, you can grab this bookmarklet for +1 recommendations that should work with most other browsers.

Import your iPhoto albums with Picasa for Mac. You’ve got a lot of iPhoto events, and now you want to share those photos on Google+, which actually has a great photo viewer. Apple has built Facebook support into iPhoto, but obviously there’s no direct method for getting that content to Google+. But with Picasa’s free native Mac app, you can import your iPhoto content and share it to your Picasa Web Albums right from your desktop. Depending on your sharing choices, the pictures will be visible in your Google+ galleries.

iOS

Use third-party Picasa apps to upload your photos. There’s no instant upload for iPhones and iPads as there is for Android devices. But you can get your photos from your mobile to your Google+ account without having to upload to a computer first. Just choose one of the available iOS Picasa photo uploading tools, like Web Albums, and then upload the pic you want to share to a public gallery on Picasa. Once you’ve done that, navigate to the photo in the Google+ mobile browser app and comment on the photo to share it to your stream.

Bookmarklets for sharing. For sharing sites and saving content to your +1 list, bookmarklets that work with mobile Safari are your best bet. The one I mentioned above should work for your iOS devices, too.

Share from desktop to mobile. You can use Google+ as a handy way to quickly share links between your desktop and mobile devices, by adding an email address that you have registered on your smartphone to one of your sharing circles on Google+. So, for instance, you could create an iPhone reading list and re-share interesting links in your Google stream to a specific circle called “for iPhone” that just contains your own email address, or you could set up a circle with the email addresses of your coworkers or project team for easy forwarding of interesting links and notes.

Google+ will likely improve as it iterates, and it will offer even more avantages for Mac and iOS users, especially when (and if) Apple approves the official Google+ iOS application. But even at this early stage, I’ve found that it enriches my computing experience on any Apple platform. Any advice you can add based on your own use of Google+?

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Fluid is an OS X app that allows you to specify a website address, choose an icon, and create a site-specific browser application that does away with the browser window and leaves you with just the site itself. One popular use for Fluid is to create a Facebook app, and the recently launched Google+ is another prime candidate. Fluid is the creation of Todd Ditchendorf, a one-time Apple employee who helped develop the OS X Dashboard and Dashboard Widgets.

The 1.2 update for Fluid brings Lion compatibility for the app (developers have had access to the preview version of OS X 10.7 for some time now), and also introduces full-screen mode support for users running Lion. There’s a catch: Those who want the full-screen support will have to pay the optional $4.99 licensing fee for Fluid, which also unlocks the ability to pin apps created in Fluid to the menu bar, and enables separate cookie storage for Fluid apps.

Safari in OS X Lion boasts a full-screen mode as well, but it can’t compare to using complex web apps like Google Docs completely unencumbered by any browser chrome, since you have more usable space and less incentive to get distracted with Fluid apps. Believe me, once you get the hang of how switching between full-screen apps in Lion works (a three or four-finger swipe), you’ll really appreciate this new feature in Fluid.

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I first used Fluid, the site-specific browser creation tool for Mac OS X, a long time ago. But I didn’t find it compelling enough to integrate it into my daily life, in part because virtually all of my digital life still lived on the desktop. As I personally moved more and more to the cloud, it became key.

I tend to use Fluid apps for things that I want to have open and at the ready all day. These are things I consider to be more like apps than websites, so having a separate window makes sense, if for no other reason than I can easily command-tab among applications by selecting the appropriate high-resolution logo. With Safari, Chrome and Firefox, I’m in and out of a lot of websites throughout the work day, but most are content sites, or web applications that I use once per week or less. Here are a few of the key ways I’m using Fluid today.

Google Calendar

I long ago tired of problems with invitations in iCal. There were just too many frustrating examples of invitations not coming through properly or at all, and I invested the maximum amount of time I was willing to solve it. Last year, I also tired of Mail.app’s performance when dealing with many accounts and large numbers of messages. I was using Google Apps for several accounts with IMAP enabled, and using Mail.app as my client. Since they were all Google accounts anyway, I made the decision to switch to Mailplane, which performs flawlessly and had the added benefit of saving a lot of precious space on my MacBook Air’s hard drive.

Then I started noticing how good email invitations looked in the Gmail interface, and how easy it was to add them to the Google Calendar associated with that account. It just worked. But I also have several calendars. So I decided to make one Google Calendar account my main or master account, and shared all my other accounts with it, with full read and write permissions. Then I created a Fluid app for that Google Calendar account. I now have one Fluid app called gCal that holds my various calendars in one view, and I turned on Google Mobile Sync for them all, so I immediately get changes on my iPhone and vice versa.

Pandora

Pandora has become my music source of choice while working. I’ve got several stations queued up, including Wilco, Spoon, Ben Harper, and Res, among others. I haven’t really tracked it, but I don’t think I come close to Pandora’s maximum of 40 hours of listening per month. If I exceed that, I’ll need to look into a paid Pandora One account, which has its own player download. In the meantime, I’m quite content to load Pandora in a Fluid app, start it up, and hide the window from view until I need to click the button that says I’m still listening. Again, having it in a separate window that I can hide from view while still using Safari is a huge win for me.

Facebook

There’s not much I need to say about Facebook, which has taken the world by storm. But I am now syncing my contacts with Facebook via their iPhone app, which I love because it’s the easiest and best way to have friend’s pictures show when they call. I once suffered from Facebook Fatigue, but I’ve gotten past that and now use it as an essential communications tool for certain contacts. I’m just starting to use it for some serious social marketing for my projects, and having it open in its own window makes it easier to keep abreast of messages and other updates.

WordPress

Finally, TheAppleBlog is hosted on WordPress, so I created a Fluid app specifically for creating posts like these. I’m also finding it more and more useful to tap out ideas that pop into my head and create rough outlines while the ideas are fresh, and save them as drafts. Then, when I have dedicated time later in the day or week, I can spend more time working on the posts.

Are you using Fluid in your daily Mac experience? If so, how do you use it? If not, why?

The advent of the cloud over the past few years has meant that a lot of the tasks that we were used to doing on our Mac have now moved to the web. This brings with it a host of issues, from data ownership to reliability of services (see recent Sidekick fiasco) and whether the web can deliver a Mac-like experience.

Putting all that aside, however, a more mundane problem is managing all of those sites and getting to them quickly and easily. Individual apps conveniently come with their own icon on your dock, web apps do not, forcing you to dig through the myriad of open tabs in your browser to find the app you need.If you’ve truly made the jump to cloud computing there is, thankfully, a better way: site specific browsers (SSBs). The basic idea is simple: Create a separate web browser, complete with its own icon on the dock, to browse to a single site. We’ve covered an excellent example of a site specific browser here on TAB in the past, Mailplane, which is used to access Gmail’s online interface.

The beauty of an SSB is not only do you get the bonus of neatly having your own icon for a single web application, but it also allows that site to integrate with OS X more completely. For example you can have things like address book access and dock badges, all things that Mailplane does for Gmail.

That’s great if you use Gmail, but what about all the other great web-based applications out there? Although there are not specific SSBs for things like Twitter, Google Calendar, Remember The Milk and other web services, there are two different programs that will let you take any web site and turn it into a site specific browser: Fluid and Prism. The major difference between the two is that Fluid uses Webkit to power its SSBs, while Prism uses the Gecko browser base that runs Firefox.

Aside from these underlying technologies, the two programs offer remarkably similar functionality. Simply enter a web address, choose an icon (or just use the site favicon), and voila, a new program based on that site will be created for you. What’s more, each browser can accept various scripts to add functionality like a dock icon and even Growl notifications. You can even make an SSB your default email or RSS program.

In many ways SSBs may represent the future of computing. Just look at Google’s upcoming Chrome OS, where the browser is the operating system. In such a situation it makes no sense to continue using the outdated system of web pages and browser bookmarks. When a website is a program unto itself you can argue that it deserves to be treated as one at the operating system level.

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My interpretation of minimalism in the home office is removing all distracting items that are not constantly utilized. For software, this is both easy and cheap. Becoming a hardware minimalist is slightly more expensive and time consuming and I recommend reading Apartment Therapy’s Unplggd for recommendations.

Minimal Mac

I recently discovered a website called Minimal Mac, and it is rapidly climbing the charts as my favorite blog. Naturally, it has a simple design that utilizes plenty of white space. Reading this blog has inspired me to clean up my iMac by reducing the clutter. Below are a few quick and easy steps to help you reach software bliss.

Clean Up Your Desktop

Open Preferences for the Finder and deselect everything. Organize your files in the Documents folder. Doing this will remove all files, folders, hard drives, etc. from your desktop.

Empty Out Your Menu Bar

Do you always use the same Wi-Fi network? Remove the Wi-Fi icon in the Network System Preferences. Time machine backs up every hour automatically, so there’s no need for the icon. Are you unsure if it’s AM or PM? First, get more sleep. Second, remove it in the Date & Time System Preferences. Use your keyboard to change the volume? Remove the Volume icon in Sound System Preferences. You get the idea.

For extra credit you can remove the Spotlight icon using Onyx, a thorough maintenance and optimization tool.

Warning: disabling the icon also disables the hot key to activate Spotlight. Only do this if you don’t use Spotlight or if you’re satisfied with using Command-F in the Finder.

Simplify Your iTunes Controller

The built-in mini controller for iTunes is simple to use, but it’s definitely too large and distracting. I recently discovered the perfect app for reducing your iTunes controller to a single line of text. It’s called Bowtie. It offers a variety of cool themes, but the one that is consistent with this post is Simple Bar. It provides previous and next buttons, the artist, the title, and rating controls.

I don’t usually rate songs in iTunes, so I got fancy and removed the stars from the Simple Bar theme by modifying its plist and html files.

Forget About iChat

Start using Adium. It’s extremely customizable and it supports a slew of networks (including Twitter). Below is a screenshot of my preferences that made my buddy list virtually unnoticeable.

Empty Out Your Dock

Leave only the most essential applications in your dock. For me that’s Mailplane, Adium, Safari, Google Reader Fluid app, iTunes, and Tweetie.

Search for a Desktop background

Find a desktop background that is both soothing and non-distracting. For me, that’s a nature-related black and white photo. Here’s the one I chose. You can find more by searching Flickr.

Ten Minutes Later

Below is my new desktop after following these steps. Smaller dock, quiet buddy list, empty menubar, serene background, clean desktop.

What are some ways you keep your Mac minimal?

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What You Need

1. Fluid – This allows you to create applications from web sites. In our case we will be creating a Google Calendar application, and a Google Tasks application.

2. Calendar icon

3. Tasks icon

4. 10 minutes

The Steps

1. Download Fluid.

2. Open Fluid.app.

3. The first app we’ll create is for Google Calendar.  Let’s use “Calendar” for the name.

4. The URL for Google Calendar is google.com/calendar/m.

Note: For Google Apps users it’s google.com/calendar/hosted/[your domain name]/m.

5. The dock or menu bar icon for this application can either be Google Calendar’s favicon, the tiny icon that appears in the address bar of your browser when you visit the site, or something a little fancier, like what I suggested above.  To use the fancy icon select “Other” from the Icon menu, and locate the newly downloaded icon on your hard drive.

6. Click Create.

7. After a few seconds you’ll have the option to Launch. Go ahead. Don’t be afraid.

8. The window that appears is a web browser that will automatically open to Google Calendar.  Log in (if necessary).

9. Go to the Calendar menu and hover over User Agent.  Select “Mobile Safari 1.1.3 – iPhone”.

10. Go to the File menu and select Close Window.

11. Go to the File menu and select New Window.

12. Go to the Calendar menu and select “Convert to MenuExtra SSB…”  Click OK in the warning window and you’ll have a new item in the menu bar: a tiny calendar icon.  Click on it to see the mobile version of your Google Calendar.  You can drag the lower-left corner to resize the window.

Repeat for Google Tasks

For Google Tasks, follow the same steps (you obviously don’t have to download Fluid again).  The URL you will use is gmail.com/tasks.

Note: For Google Apps users it’s mail.google.com/tasks/a/[your domain name].

Tasks will not properly load until you perform step 9 and set the User Agent to “Other”.  Enter the following text into the window:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20

You’re done! Now you can quickly and easily view upcoming appointments and manage your tasks list.

If you have any questions leave a comment.  Good luck getting organized!

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Google Reader has been my RSS reader of choice since I made the switch from Bloglines last year. This new skin makes the site seem brand new, and makes it even easier for Reader to stand alone as desktop app with Fluid or Prism. To set up Helvetireader with Fluid, create a new Site Specific Browser for Google Reader, then launch the newly created app. Next, click on the script menu item, and select “New Userscript”. If you have the Developer Tools installed, this will launch Dashcode and allow you to edit the userscript. Just paste in this:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        Helvetireader
// @description Helvetireader style for Google Reader
// @include     https://*.google.com/reader/view/*
// @include     http://*.google.com/reader/view/*
// @include     htt*://*.google.*/reader/view*
// @author      Helvetireader by Jon Hicks (http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk)
// ==/UserScript==

var cssNode = document.createElement('link');
cssNode.type = 'text/css';
cssNode.rel = 'stylesheet';
cssNode.href = 'http://www.helvetireader.com/css/helvetireader.css';
cssNode.media = 'screen';
cssNode.title = 'dynamicLoadedSheet';
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(cssNode);

Save your script, and relaunch the Fluid Google Reader App. After a second, the CSS from Helvetireader will kick in, and you’ll have a brand new look and feel to Google Reader. The CSS is actually hosted on the helvetireader.com web site, so you won’t have to modify your settings as the code is updated. This script is just as easy to set up on Firefox or Opera, and can be used with Safari or Camino with a little tweaking. Hicks expects this theme to be used by 10 people at the most, I expect it will be much more popular than that.

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