How to create a Google Buzz desktop app
Use Fluid for Mac to get the iPhone/Android web app UI on your desktop.
If you’ve used Buzz in its two current versions, inside Gmail and on the iPhone, you’ve probably noticed (like me) that the iPhone web app version is much better. What’s more, Google went off and forgot about their actual paying customers — the ones on Google Apps-with-a-capital-A.
Here’s a quick little howto to take advantage of the much less clunky mobile UI for Buzz — assuming you’re on a Mac.
1. Download Fluid and run it.
2. Name it “Buzz” and set the address to “m.google.com/app/buzz”.
3. For the icon, select “Other…” and download this simple icon PNG I made as a replacement, if you want something a little less hideous than the default icon.
3. Click “Create” and then “Launch” when it’s done making your app. Don’t panic when it comes up with a normal website — we’re not done yet.
4. Select the “Buzz” menu item, then choose “User Agent” -> “Other…”
5. Enter in the Mobile Chrome / Android User Agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.0.1; en-us; Droid Build/ESD56) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17
6. Close and restart. Without restarting, while it’s still open go to “File” -> “Close Window” … then “File” -> “New Window”. Everything should suddenly come up roses.
7. You’re done. No, you’re not. To make it extra special, select “Buzz” -> “Convert to MenuExtra SSB…” Now you’re done! It should run in the menu bar and be easy to open and close just by selecting it from there.
8. Now you’re reading the epilogue.
Note: If you have any trouble with the app opening up external windows, you can change what URLs the app can visit within the SSB, but the easiest “blanket” fix is to just go to “Buzz” -> “Preferences” -> “Advanced” -> “Enable browsing to any URL”.
