Fluid is a great tool from Todd Ditchendorf, making it possible to create a stand-alone desktop app on your mac out of any website or webapp. It has some great features to even enhance your webapps, but you should really visit the Fluid site to get to know more about it.

Today I’ve dug a bit deeper into its possibilities and created a cool desktop version of Zootool’s Aquarium. This is really helpful because it brings all your collected stuff right into your mac menu bar. Let me show you how:

First of all you should download Fluid: http://fluidapp.com/
Next you should download the Zootool Fluid icon (we’ll need that later)

Open Fluid…

… and type in the stuff above. Be sure to enter the correct link to the Fluid version of the Aquarium. Also make sure to select the previously downloaded icon on your hard drive.

Click on “Launch Now” to open your newly created Aquarium app!

The created app isn’t quite how it should be, so we have to tweak it a bit.

First of all open the Aquarium perferences (click on the Apple icon > select “Preferences”) In “General Preferences” just put in the stuff from above. I’ve chosen Ctrl-Cmd-Space as Global Shortcut, but you can of course choose something different.

Afterwards go to the “Tabs Preferences” and deselect “Enable tabbed browsing” and select “Select tabs and windows as they are created”. This will make sure that all of your links in the Aquarium will open in a new Safari window and not in the Aquarium itself.

We are pretty close now. All you’ve got to do next is to convert the app to a “MenuExtra SSB”. This means that your app will show up in your menu bar and not in your dock.

Boom, it’s up there in your menu bar, but it does look messy because of the small window. Just drag the left bottom corner to adjust the window size.

When you’ve done that one last tweak is to hide the status bar at the bottom with cmd-shift-7 and that’s it.

Now you’re Aquarium is there whenever you’ll need it - even if your default browser is closed! You can open it at any time with the Global Shortcut you’ve entered earlier, start to type and search your Zoo immediately. You can even browse the results with arrow-up and arrow-down and open selected links with enter!

If you want your new Aquarium to open at startup, go to the “System Preferences” > “Accounts” > “Login Items” and add the Aquarium to your “Login Items” with the plus icon.