Zotero as a stand alone app with Fluid

Joscha
Hi, I was hoping that I can use Fluid (http://fluidapp.com/) with the new zotero://fullscreen/ feature in 2.0b7 to use Zotero as a stand alone app. It does not work though. Instead, Fluid opens the zotero.org homepage in the created app. Any idea why that is? Any work arounds?
  • amacom73
    edited September 15, 2009
    Joscha, I'd thought about doing this as well, but never got as far as trying it--it seemed to me that Zotero wouldn't work because it's not a web-app but a plug-in. That is, its functionality is part of the browser, not part of a web page.
  • Bionatsci
    it seemed to me that Zotero wouldn't work because it's not a web-app but a plug-in.
    That exactly right, but there is still another way (well actually, three ways) to achieve this.

    • First way:

      (You need to have firefox as your default web browser for this way to work)

      Create a web link on the desktop/wherever pointing to zotero://fullscreen/. In windows you can simply drag the favicon to the left of the address bar out of firefox to the desktop to create a link to any random site, and then modify the properties so the link points towards zotero://fullscreen/. I don't know how to do this on OS X or linux.

    • Second way:

      (You need to be willing to use Firefox only for Zotero, or be willing to use Zotero in a completely seperate Firefox profile for this way to work - it hijacks your homepage.)

      Set zotero://fullscreen/ as your Firefox homepage in the Firefox options menu, and instruct Firefox to always open your homepage on startup.

    • Third way:

      This is the most complicated, but should work in most cases.

      Start Firefox with a command line argument which instructs it to open zotero://fullscreen/ automatically. The command line argument you want is this:

      -new-window zotero://fullscreen/

      Now how you get from this to a dedicated icon you can click on to open Zotero is simple in Windows, but considerably more complicated in OS X and Linux. In any case this will be the subject of my next post as this one is quite long enough already and I am beginning to get nervous about pressing refresh accidentally and losing all this.
  • Bionatsci
    Further to my previous post here is how to use the command line argument trick to make a "standalone" version of Zotero.

    On Windows

    Go to the source. Keith, who authored the page I just linked, came up with the idea of a URL to open full screen Zotero, and implemented it in his plugin Zoterename. The Zotero team has now included this idea in Zotero itself. His instructions (near the bottom of the page - titled "short-cut for dedicated Zotero window") are still excellent, just use the string from my previous post, rather than the one Keith uses.

    On OS X and Linux

    This is for OS X. I presume it will be similar for linux as it is just a shell script. Bear in mind that I cant test this for either Linux or OS X, as I don't have either ATM (my Ubuntu dual boot install died a death on my laptop when I needed the space for music ;) ). Also note that I am a shell scripting newbie just hacking together stuff that I have found online - use at your own risk!

    OK, first things first, you need to know how to save an Applescript, or Linux equivalent, as an application. You are on your own there unless someone else chimes in with instructions as I have absolutely no idea how to do that.

    Put this in your Applescript:

    do shell script "<full path to firefox>
    -new-window zotero://fullscreen/
    & killall <application name>.app"

    This should all be on one line, if you copy and paste you will need to remove the newlines.

    This was adapted from here. Note that what you call your application has to match the "application name" in the script.

    Hope this helps.
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