This is going to be another one of those “first I did this, then I used this other software to make it more awesome” posts. Just, you know, FYI.

I’m late to the Google Voice party. I’m not ashamed. I didn’t sign up for Grand Central when everyone was drooling over it, either. I took a look, thought “Cool concept. I don’t need it.” and wandered away. In the time since Google bought it, took it offline, and made it Google Voice, things have changed for me. And, as a result, I see a lot of value in Google Voice. This post isn’t about that.

Google Voice is undeniably useful enough that I can see it being the first time I’m actually compelled to use a Site-Specific Browser. Fluid seems to be the SSB creator of choice on the Mac, so a quick DL and about 2 seconds worth of work got me the login page of Google Voice in a fancy little self-contained app called Google Voice. Kick. Ass.

That’s when the problems started, though. Almost every time I clicked a link in the Google Voice SSB (hereon referred to as “GV.app”), the link would open in Firefox. So, if I was in my Inbox, and clicked on “Contacts,” GV.app would stay on the inbox, and I’d have a new tab in Firefox that was the Contacts page for Google Voice.

A quick search for “Google Voice fluid.app” turned up not only the answer, but a sweet bonus. First: the Answer.

Site-Specific Browsers need limits. It seems obvious in retrospect, but this essentially means that there’s a whitelist of URLs that the SSB can visit. And, as it turns out, the dynamic URLs that Google Voice uses weren’t auto-populated into GV.app’s whitelist. Opening the Preferences of GV.app reveals a System Preferences-like window with sections broken up into multiple panes. If you click the “Advanced” pane, you’ll reveal the whitelist. Add “*google.com/voice*”, dropping the quotes, and you’re good to go!

The Bonus I found was the following: this guy put together a nice little Fluid userscript that enables Growl notifications for Google Voice Fluid apps! Here’s a direct link to the userscript, and an icon that I prefer.