A Trifle Absurd

Hacking Camino into GMail.app

Inspired by Michael McCracken’s Webmail.app, I came up with a way to turn a copy of Camino 1.1 Beta into a dedicated Gmail-reading application. Here’s how to do it (assuming you’re used to messing about inside an application package):

Make a copy of Camino.app, and rename it Gmail.app. Change the icon to something appropriate. Open up the application package, and drill down into Contents. In the MacOS folder, rename Camino to Gmail.

Then open up Info.plist. Change CFBundleExecutable, CFBundleName, and mozProfileDirName to “Gmail”. Change CFBundleIdentifier to something different (but in the same reverse-domain-name format). Save and close.

And that’s it. You now have a separate application you can use just for Gmail. Hide the bookmark bar and collapse the toolbar and you have a simple, clean window.

Well, almost. The status bar is still there, and Camino doesn’t provide a way to hide it. But you can get rid of it: open the Gmail.app package again and go to Contents/Resources/English.lproj. Load up BrowserWindow.nib in Interface Builder and simply delete the status bar controls.

Of course, there’s nothing particular to Gmail about all this — you could use the same technique to make a specialized browser app for anything.