The first shots of Snow Leopard, Apple’s new operating system that should be here in about a year, are now starting to appear online. On a German site, of all crazy things! Anyhow, the biggest news from the released screen shots is the existence of a mysterious “Save as Web Application” menu item in Safari. What this does is save the Web site—let’s say Gmail, for example—and somehow saves a copy of it for use offline and on the desktop. In other words, it saves a Web site and turns it into a locally executable application. We’re officially going backwards, functionality-wise.
All that, of course, is idle speculation. “Save as Web Applcation” could well mean something entirely different in Apple Speak.
The rest of the screen shots, and there’s a lot of them, just show updated versions of apps like Quicktime.
via Apple Insider
My guess is that they going the site specific browser route a la Fluid (www.fluidapp.com) not offline access. But who knows.
All that means is that you will be saving it as a Site-Specific Browser. We’ve heard rumors from other places that Safari will feature SSB support, so this is no surprise.
What will be surprising is if it can possibly be better than Fluid.
I already got that for my Safari 4 beta on Leopard. No need snow leopard…
Does “Save as Web Application” really seem all that wildly different than a Dashboard app? Could it just be the next level of Dashboard development?
These web apps might be embeddable as live components in iWork docs, spreadshets, DBs, presentations etc. in much the same way as with dear old ..
>Cyberdog was an OpenDoc-based suite of internet applications, including email and news readers, a web browser and address book management components, as well as drag and drop FTP. OpenDoc allowed these components to be reused and embedded in other documents by the user. For instance, a “live” Cyberdog web page could be embedded in a presentation program, one of the common demonstrations of OpenDoc. -WikiP.
It’d be really neat if true but I sort of doubt it..
This is not really all that new and not dependent on Snow Leopard.
I beta test a Browser (a minority player in the browser world) and it is also able to Save As an application.
Basically what you get is a stripped down version of the browser (missing many GUI elements) but it is an app in the real sense of the word.