Use Basecamp as a Standalone Application (on a Mac)

I’ve found a great way to keep Basecamp open all the time and not let it get lost in all my tabs and windows in Firefox. What makes this possible, is a great app for Mac called Fluid, which leverages the WebKit open source web browser engine (the same engine that powers Safari). Here’s how you set it up: 

1. Download & install Fluid.
2. Optional: download this nice PNG to use as the application logo.
3. Open Fluid and enter the information below into the window that opens:
   1. URL: enter the URL for your Basecamp site (it might be something like this: http://example.updatelog.com/)
   2. Name: BaseCamp (or whatever you want to call it)
   3. Location: Leave it set to your Applications folder.
   4. Icon: Choose the PNG that you downloaded above.
   5. Click Create.
4. Voila! You’ve got a BaseCamp application now!
5. Okay, there is one more little trick: When you open your new BaseCamp application it will take you to a login window. When you try to login, it will try to open the window in your default browser because the login URL is different from your Basecamp URL. The workaround is to open BaseCamp Preferences, click Advanced, and select Allow browsing to any URL. After you login once, you can switch this back to Allow browsing to URLs matching these patterns. UPDATE: Okay, one more gotcha. To view Writeboards, you’ll have to add a second pattern like this: *123.writeboard.com/*
    

You can also use Fluid to create other standalone applications for sites that you use a lot (e.g. WordPress Admin for updating your blog, Google Reader, etc.). When doing so, be sure to check the Flickr Group for Fluid Icons to search for a nice 512px icon for your app.

UPDATE: I wish I knew of something similar to Fluid for Windows that I could recommend to my Windows-using colleagues. If anyone knows of something, please leave a comment. Prism will let you do the same thing on Windows. Thanks for the tip, Budd!

UPDATE2: One more little trick to share. I find it useful to have the Formatting Guide (from the Writeboards help area) open in a separate window so I can refer to it while writing. You can use the same formatting from the Writeboards on other parts of Basecamp, namely Messages. So this is handy to have open if you want to do a bulleted list or somesuch in a Message. Here’s how I set up having that open in a separate window all the time: I saved the BaseCamp Formatting Guide to an html file (formatting_guide.html). I then saved that html file inside my BaseCamp.app (file:///Applications/BaseCamp.app/Contents/Resources/formatting_guide.html, just to have it in a place where it wouldn’t get lost).UPDATE: inside the App is not a good idea because it will get deleted at the next software update. Now I’m just saving it in the Applications folder. Then I opened a new window in BaseCamp and opened this file and added a bookmark in case it gets closed accidentally.

And on a related note, BaseCamp uses Textile for its formatting. There’s a Textile Quick Reference with some more options than those shown by BaseCamps Formatting Guide.