How to get Gmail’s iPad interface as a Mac app

Prompted by some tweets by @mheerema and @samsoffes, I just used Fluid to create a site-specific browser that uses Google’s awesome new iPad-optimized interface for Gmail. It appears LifeHacker posted something similar just as I figured this out, but I like this better than using Firefox extensions.

To do this simply:

1. Download Fluid
2. Launch Fluid and create a site-specific browser for http://gmail.com and call it “Gmail”
3. Launch the newly-created application and in the menu bar go to Gmail > User Agent > Other
4. Input this user-agent: Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10, then press “Okay”
5. Reload the view by pressing Command-R.
6. That’s it! You should have the beautiful new iPad optimized interface.

Hope you enjoy this!

Bonus: Download these icons and use them for your new Gmail app: http://csi.nfshost.com/goodies/

Need Help? Watch Sam do it: http://screenr.com/b0M