Creating your Google Reader Application with Google Chrome

Google Chrome was finally released, and I’ve been playing around with it for a few hours.

I decided to try out creating a “Google Reader Application” by making use of the “Chromeless Chrome” functionality.

In the images (click on them for a larger look) you will see the 4 basic steps to creating the Chrome-less application:

1 – The initial web site (Google Reader) in a basic/standard Google Chrome browser. You can see it’s still in the normal browser chrome because of the tabs and URL bar, etc.

2 – Click on the “page” icon to the right of the URL bar and click on “Create application Shortctuts…”

3 – You will then have a couple of prompts to answer and you can save your shortcut to the desktop. You can see that Google Chrome has chosen the Favicon as the “application icon”.

4 – In this last screenshot you can see what the Google Reader app will look like, now that it doesn’t have the usual “browser chrome”. (See my previous article about Google Chrome for more info on that).

And, we now have a “Google Reader Application“, especially since we don’t really need an internet connection if you’ve enabled Google Gears for this site.