MacOS – Google Inbox as a standalone app via Chrome

chrome-extensionsgoogle-chromemacmacosplist

Google Inbox recently added compatibility with Safari and yet still does not play nice with Fluid.

I decided I might as well use Chrome. Google recently improved the way "desktop app extensions" work by giving them their own independent icons in Applications and Launchpad.

Unfortunately, this is acting like a glorified bookmark, rather than a standalone app. I.e., it opens with a toolbar and opens the site as a tab. I tried exploring the "contents" of the application icon Google creates. I found a plist but could not figure out if there was away to force the app to open an independent standalone Chrome window.

Any ideas on how I could modify the app to act less like a bookmark and more like a standalone desktop app ?

Best Answer

Akmal has released Chrome App that does exactly this. You could take a look at his code to see how he's done it.

I would mention that he is running the webview through scan.me, so getting analytics to how many people are visiting it.

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to Auto-Hide the address bar in Google Chrome

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're asking, but I think you mean in full screen mode judging by the tags.

Simply uncheck View > Always Show Toolbar in Full Screen (⇧⌘F):

Inbox by Gmail – making a small application

You can try Fluid -- it can create one off, WebKit "applications" that look a bit like native applications though are actually single web pages running in a de-decorated WebKit browser window. I've used it successfully in the past for things like Fogbugz.

Fluid may not work though since Inbox requires Chrome and I'm not sure Fluid will identify the browser in a way that'll let Inbox work. It may complain it's not running in Chrome.

If that's the case, here is a shell script that will create a standalone Chrome "app" for you similar to how Fluid works, but with the underlying engine for the app being Chrome. I haven't it used it, but the idea and implementation look sound. You should fork that gist if you're going to use -- gists can disappear. The script, recreated here, for reference is:

#!/bin/sh

echo "What should the Application be called (no spaces allowed e.g. GCal)?"
read inputline
name="$inputline"

echo "What is the url (e.g. https://www.google.com/calendar/render)?"
read inputline
url="$inputline"

echo "What is the full path to the icon (e.g. /Users/username/Desktop/icon.png)?"
read inputline
icon="$inputline"

chromePath="/Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome"
appRoot="/Applications"

# various paths used when creating the app
resourcePath="$appRoot/$name.app/Contents/Resources"
execPath="$appRoot/$name.app/Contents/MacOS" 
profilePath="$appRoot/$name.app/Contents/Profile"
plistPath="$appRoot/$name.app/Contents/Info.plist"

# make the directories
mkdir -p  "$resourcePath" "$execPath" "$profilePath"

# convert the icon and copy into Resources
if [ -f "$icon" ] ; then
    sips -s format tiff "$icon" --out "$resourcePath/icon.tiff" --resampleHeightWidth 128 128 >& /dev/null
    tiff2icns -noLarge "$resourcePath/icon.tiff" >& /dev/null
fi

# create the executable
cat >"$execPath/$name" <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
exec "$chromePath"  --app="$url" --user-data-dir="$profilePath" "\$@"
EOF
chmod +x "$execPath/$name"

# create the Info.plist 
cat > "$plistPath" <<EOF
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" â€œhttp://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtdâ€>
<plist version=â€1.0â€³>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
<string>$name</string>
<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>icon</string>
</dict>
</plist>
EOF

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – How to Auto-Hide the address bar in Google Chrome

Inbox by Gmail – making a small application

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