Run FreeAgent’s mobile site on your desktop

We love some of the features of FreeAgent mobile, but some like the task timer aren’t available to the desktop version of the website. You can add /mobile to the domain of the site and get the mobile version, but it often falls out of it and you end up with the desktop version.

As accurate time-recording has become important to us, a desktop client for FreeAgent that just works like an application would help us a lot. There are some for OSX, but paid for, and ultimately, for what we need, web is just fine.

So, we thought about it and James came up with a way to get Chrome running such that it could act like an application with the mobile version of FreeAgent.

Step 1: Make sure you’ve got a folder called c:\data\chrome and the following will give you a proper mobile version of FreeAgent.
Step 2: Create a shortcut and use this as the Target command making sure the URL is correct for your company’s FreeAgent account and tweaking sizes for your screen and preferences:

chrome.exe --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.2; en-us; Galaxy Nexus Build/ICL53F) AppleWebKit" --app-window-size=400,900 --user-data-dir="c:\data\chrome" --app="https://yourfreeagentaccount.freeagentcentral.com/"

Step 3: Set the Start in value as:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application

Step 4: Now you can save your shortcut somewhere useful and off you go!

I run two different FreeAgent logins – a full access one, and a limited one for time keeping, etc which I use for logging on to the mobile edition of the site. Saves a lot of hassle if you’re the boss.

The end result should look a lot like this:

Tracking time with FreeAgent’s mobile site, on a desktop.

If you’re a Mac owner I believe the options string for Chrome should work for you. We’ll post specific instructions on here when we get a chance.