Sign in Subscribe

It's pretty incredible when you can dream up an idea or an improvement in your flow one day and have it in your Applications folder the next, but that's what happens when you run into cool kats like Chip Cuccio, the developer of Gcal and now VibeKit. I got this message tonight: http://www.odeo.com/flash/audio_player_standard_gray.swf
powered by ODEO The point of the app is pretty simple: give me a stand-alone dashboard for all the web apps that I need to get to quickly that don't have dedicated desktop-side apps (like PBWiki or Blinksale)... and that keeps me posted on what's going on so that I'm not constantly switching from my Gmail tab to NetNewsWire to 1001. And so on. Oh, and good news, it's open source and supports Sparkle framework for software updates. So get yourself a NetVibes account and download now (Universal binary)!

💬 Comments from the original post

børge · 2006-07-31 03:35:25
Sounds cool! I always have a tab open with Netvibes in Firefox (still having some trouble with Flock, unfortunatly). Any chance of a Windows and Linux version any time soon..?
Alex Hillman · 2006-07-31 08:09:46
hm, i can thinkof a handful of tabs that are ALWAYS open in my browser , but do I want them as a standalone app? what happens when you link OFF netvibes...does it open up a regular browser, or does it stay in "VibeKit"?
Chris Messina · 2006-07-31 08:13:51
@børge -- don't know of anything right now, but I'll share this with the NetVibes guys and see what they think. I imagine you could do something similar with XUL Runner... @Alex -- it'll link off to your default browser. In that sense, at least for me, it's kind of like a Dock for web apps. Having it in a standalone app means I can also CMD-Tab to it rather than hunting through multiple browser windows or tabs.
Cris 'atariboy' Pearson · 2006-07-31 10:06:55
Can't close widgets on the page. Seems to block all dialogues. Nice start though. I didn't know about netvibes before this either.. looks nice. I'd been playing with http://protopage.com/ for a couple weeks and it has been useful - but i doesn't have the features or webkit compatibility netvibes has. might have to switch :)
Chris Messina · 2006-07-31 14:20:59
Yeah, that's a bug that I discovered as well... I've ended up resorting to configuring NetVibes in Camino (where I can delete blocks) and then reloading VibeKit. Hopefully Chip can take care of that!
[...] I was reading a post by Chris Messina about a dekstop environment to NetVibes, called VibeKit. Sadly, it is only for Macs, so I can’t try it. [...]
Chip Cuccio · 2006-08-01 10:18:44
Admittedly, I slapped VibeKit together (for Chris :-), and I honestly don't have time in the foreseeable future to extend or fix it. I invite others to help the project; http://chip.cuccio.us/projects/vibekit/#devel It's 100% open source.
Philp Ashlock · 2006-08-10 14:18:16
How about the same concept applied to YouOS? You could still run NetVibes maximized within the YouOS browser. Check it out - http://www.youos.com
Chris Messina · 2006-08-11 08:33:27
Hey Philip -- you could, but the problem is that you're still living inside the browser, which is inherently less stable than the OS. With these microbrowser webkit apps, if any of them crash, you don't lose the rest of what you were doing. Until there's really good support for session saving, I'll take individuals apps over tabbed apps anyday.
fsdfd · 2006-12-13 02:09:45
Hey Philip — you could, but the problem is that you’re still living inside the browser, which is inherently

Announcing VibeKit, the NetVibes desktop application