At my new job, I have had the luxury of using a Macbook Pro for my work computer instead of a Windows machine.  Overall this has been a significant upgrade, but there have been a handful of areas that I have struggled with in adapting to the OSX environment.  A big part of my pain is learning all of the keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Office for Mac, which have little overlap with its Windows older sibling (I can’t tell you how many times muscle memory has caused me to minimize Powerpoint when I meant to create a new slide).

One thing that I have really missed is the ability to create application shortcuts in Chrome.  In the Windows version of Chrome, I could take heavily used web pages (like email or application monitoring tools) and give them their own application icon.  This gave them their own place in the dock, and its own icon in the alt-tab view for quick application switching.

For some reason, the Mac version of Chrome doesn’t have this option.  To make matters worse, Macs hide each application’s various windows from you.  Alt-Tab only allows you to switch between applications, and then once you are inside, you have to use Alt-~ to switch between the windows.  I know that Mission Control allows you to see all the windows, but if you have a lot of applications and windows running at once, this is information overload.  It’s hard to find the one you want.

Today I was experimenting with the much talked about Trello for task and project management, and I found myself desperately wanting to give Trello its own spot on the doc.  Every time I wanted to pull it up to make an update, I had to Alt-Tab over to Chrome, then Alt-~ to the correct chrome window, and then find the Trello tab.  I needed a better solution.

A quick search led me to CreateCgApp.  You simply run the application, give it a link, give it an icon, and voila, you have your own separate window and dock for a Chrome application.  You can alt-tab to it, and it even gets its own spot in Mission Control.

Creating a standalone Chrome shortcut in the doc is as easy as 1-2-3

Just what I needed.  Now I can pull up Trello any time, easily.

Trello now has its own spot in the dock