App review: Fogger

Some of you are familiar with Fogger, one of the latest and greatest gifts from the Open-Source community. It's a tool to crate your own web-apps, i.e websites integratEd into your system so that they behave more like apps rather than webpages. 

It all started a couple of years ago. I have been dreaming of having a system fully integrated with the web, with the least possible distraction still, that would walk me through all the sites like a breeze. Let me elaborate. While some may argue that web-browsers such as Chromium and Firefox are actually for browsing and accessing sites such as OMGUbuntu, Webupd8, Facebook, Science Daily etc. many of us still find it a bit tiresome to daily open them, jump to the sites of our preferences, return to Home and so on. This is where the swiftness of the webapps come into play. Just use your launcher and your fingers, type the first letters of the name of a webapp and hit enter, it opens like a charm.


But what exactly is fogger? As Launchpad describes it, it's a web-bridge, between the webapps and linux desktop.

Both Chromium and Firefox support treating pages like apps. But I must confess, they're far from being perfect. Fogger is thus one of the most elegant, and arguably the best (till now) solution to the problem at hand, to integrate commonly visited sites with Ubuntu and other Linux distros.


If you haven't already installed or tried Fogger, here are the reasons for you to try:


1. It makes accessing sites and webpages much, much faster, especially when combined with the flexibility of your launcher such as Kupfer, Do or Synapse.

2. It integrates and bundles them very tightly with your system. You have the more app-like feel, as you flip thorough your facebook pages.

3. You can give custom names to websites and pages you add, and you can add as many as you wish.

4. It's incredibly easy to add new sites and pages. Just enter the url (copy-paste it from browser) and give a name, and hit enter.

5. It gives you more time and focused approach with your browser. You can use it only for research.

6. Still now, no decent Facebook application exists for Ubuntu. While Hotot and likes can save your twitter account, Fogger can be used in real time to make your facebook experience better.

7. And, this helps you make your web-browsing habits more regular. I mean, say you want to checkout OMGUbuntu everyday, or maybe your Facebook account. Fogger can help regularise the habit.


Fogger is thus one the best solutions I've encountered so far. It's by far one of the best APIs I've ever used. Even if you don't use a launcher like me, you can always access fogger using HUD, the famous Heads-Up Display that Unity utilizes. But in my opinion, launchers are easier to access, which is a different story though.


To install the updated version of Fogger today, simply open your terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:loneowais/fogger

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install fogger