Bubbles are cool
3D3R, a small software studio in Israel led by Ohad Eder-Pressman and friends, is preaching for "good, simple and straight-to-the-point solutions". And guess what. This is what they actually deliver.
3D3R just released the first beta of Bubbles - a "Simplified, Stripped-Down & Straight-To-The-Point browser window, that is tailor-made for housing those cool Web apps".
I love Bubbles. It's such a simple, good idea.
The desktop we use was designed with the assumption that most of the apps we use are available on the desktop, and therefore, they can be minimized to the task bar, iconized into the system tray, right-clicked to provide a context-sensitive menu, etc.
But guess what. As more and more of the basic services we use are moving online into cool web apps, I find that a lot of my time is spent inside the browser's (tabbed, if lucky) window frame.
Bubbles bridges the gap between Windows desktop apps and web apps. It creates a small hosted-browser frame for a web site, which behaves pretty much like an independent Windows app.
The window is minimal - nothing but the actual web page, no toolbars, sidebars, status bars, etc. This window can be minimized to the task bar or the tray, uses the web site logo as its icon, and can provide its own context sensitive menu when right-clicked.
It's not perfect yet, but what was done, was done right. I'd love to see the option to have Back / Forward / Refresh buttons for sites that rely on them for functionality, a better task bar double-click logic, and a few other bits and bytes, but hey, it's the first beta release.
Small, simple, makes sense.
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