If you are a frequent user of your Campaign Monitor account, you might have experienced the pain of your browser shutting down with your Campaign Monitor tab still open, midway through a campaign. Or you might just like to keep Campaign Monitor open during the day to check your latest report statistics.
For Mac OSX users, there is a simple and free solution. Using Fluid you can take your Campaign Monitor account out of your normal browser window and run it like a native application. Technically it is actually a site specific browser.
To get started, download Fluid. When you run it, you just need to fill in a few details.
The URL will be whatever address you use to login to your specific account (with your subdomain or custom domain), rather than the main Campaign Monitor login page. You can give it whatever name you like. To set the icon that will be used for your application, choose ‘other’ from the icon drop down.
If you’d like to use your own icon (or customize one for your client for example) you can do so. Here’s a slick Campaign Monitor logo you might like to use (click through for a <a larger version).
When you hit ‘create’ Fluid makes an app for you, and you can stick that right into your dock.
The last thing you need to do is change the advanced settings. Open your app and go to preferences / advanced and make sure it is set to browse any URL. That stops you being kicked out of the window when following certain links.
Now when you startup the application, you’ll have a standalone instance of your Campaign Monitor account that won’t be touched if you have problems in your other browser windows. Sweet!
If you are a Windows user, there is a very similar product available called Prism which you can use directly from Firefox.
You might think about setting this up for your clients as another way to further rebrand Campaign Monitor as your own product. Your client’s won’t need to even see the address bar, and you can have your own logo in their dock or task bar.
Let us know if you’ve done this for your clients!
