Fluid Disturbia, by Vermin Inc on flickr.
I’ve been postponing writing about smart.fm (formly known as iknow) since at least half a year. I still don’t feel confident enough to share any deeper thought about how it works and how to use it. Anyway I’ve been enjoying its usage for about a year now and they keep rockin! One think i would recommend to do though would be to not use it on your main browser! Why? there are a lot of reason for it:
- First i keep getting sidetracked by all the other stuff, bookmarks or Facebook stuff happening and so on…
- Second browser are optimize for actually changing sites, they have thousand features to find new sites (google search bar for example) a menu bar on top and many other things working in the background that you simply don’t need.
- Third du to this bloat of feature, browsers like safari or especially firefox (add-ons i’m looking at you) are much heavy weighted which can on older machine significantly slow down your usage experience.
- Finally even though it is not a problem chrome at least, if any other website crashes during your learning, it’s bye bye smart.fm… not so cool.
What’s the solution? Using a specific site browser. It’s really easy to do if you are on Mac OS X, you can simply use fluid. That way you have a light weighted application that is specifically built to learn with smart.fm, it doesn’t have any add-ons or bookmark or anything. For me using that app make the whole thing significantly faster (on firefox i have always about 60 tab or more open…), i can focus on learning with it without being side tracked. Moreover i have the benefits of being able to tab in and out smart.fm as it was its own stand alone application.
One last thing i want to mention, i use to use the crappy -at least when it come to the resolution- icon from the website. A quick question on twitter and the guys at cerego uploaded an icon on flickr! Thanks to you guys for being so responsive!
Here is a quick how to in three screenshot, you need to download the fluid application first. (here is the app in case you have any trouble)
After launching fluid, enter the url http://smart.fm here and choose a name for the app
Then choose an icon, i would suggest choosing the one, the smart.fm team did.
and finally hit Create!
P.S. you can use specific site browser for many other pages! visit this flickr group to get some ideas 
How to make a fluid instance for smart.fm and why
Fluid Disturbia, by Vermin Inc on flickr.
I’ve been postponing writing about smart.fm (formly known as iknow) since at least half a year. I still don’t feel confident enough to share any deeper thought about how it works and how to use it. Anyway I’ve been enjoying its usage for about a year now and they keep rockin! One think i would recommend to do though would be to not use it on your main browser! Why? there are a lot of reason for it:
What’s the solution? Using a specific site browser. It’s really easy to do if you are on Mac OS X, you can simply use fluid. That way you have a light weighted application that is specifically built to learn with smart.fm, it doesn’t have any add-ons or bookmark or anything. For me using that app make the whole thing significantly faster (on firefox i have always about 60 tab or more open…), i can focus on learning with it without being side tracked. Moreover i have the benefits of being able to tab in and out smart.fm as it was its own stand alone application.
One last thing i want to mention, i use to use the crappy -at least when it come to the resolution- icon from the website. A quick question on twitter and the guys at cerego uploaded an icon on flickr! Thanks to you guys for being so responsive!
Here is a quick how to in three screenshot, you need to download the fluid application first. (here is the app in case you have any trouble)
After launching fluid, enter the url http://smart.fm here and choose a name for the app
Then choose an icon, i would suggest choosing the one, the smart.fm team did.
and finally hit Create!
P.S. you can use specific site browser for many other pages! visit this flickr group to get some ideas