Mozilla Prism is a very handy utility for splitting out "web applications" such as Facebook and Google Mail from your web browser and allowing them to run as stand-alone applications on your desktop. Amongst other things there is a massive speed increase, particularly on low-powered computers such as netbooks.

The Ubuntu repos contain a selection of Prism apps you can install using apt-get. I use:

prism-google-mail
prism-google-calendar
prism-google-docs
prism-facebook

and there are others too.

However the Google apps use your @googlemail.com address by default, which is no use if you want to log into your own Google Apps mail for example. It took a long time to work out how to edit the installed shortcuts so they open your Google Apps sites instead, but here is how, using the Google Mail launcher a an example:

The first time you run prism-google-mail it unzips /usr/share/prism/apps/gmail.webapp to /home/$USER/.prism/$PROFILE/webapps/google.mail@developer.mozilla.org. Ideally we'd be able to change the contents of the /usr/share/prism/apps/gmail.webapp files and re-zip it, but I haven't yet got it to work. Also any changes you make will be lost whenever you upgrade the prism-* packages or re-install them.

So to change the URLs of the Prism apps after the first time they've been run (and hence unzipped to ~/.prism):

• open ~/.prism/$PROFILE/webapps/google.mail@developer.mozilla.org/webapp.ini
• change the URL in this file to your Google Apps URL (e.g. http://mail.tamias.co.uk)
• save, and re-launch the Google Mail application from the main menu.

It should now load your Google Apps Mail in a standalone window with the GMail icon in your window list. The same procedure applies for Google Calendar or any other Google Apps sitet you want to run in Prism.