I finished up my prototype, made a quick video and posted it on Twitter, relieved that I was now done with this idea and could move on.Īnd it kind of blew up. Allow the user to use the mobile version, and so on.

The rest was details grab the favicon and use it as the macOS icon. Name the app, launch it, and you get this little perfect NYTimes native-like app: The first wave: What is is this sorcery In fact, here's a fully functional version of Flotato in 11 lines of SwiftUI: import SwiftUI Why on earth does this not exist? I mean, there are so many smart people out there. Over the years I've learned that great ideas come with confusion. 'Rename app to launch the web site?', 'Rename-able app'? The only thing was, I didn't know what to google. right?Īt the time, it seemed so obvious that I was dead sure that if I googled it, I'd find page after page of blue links to apps that do exactly this. Rename it 'Youtube', and now you're good on conspiracies and cats. What if you made the world's simplest browser by using the app's name as the URL bar. The elevator bounced as I stepped in and smashed the 2nd floor button. I just want to use macOS the way the macOS designers intended. Why isn't every web app a native app, too? I don't care how it's built. I have one million open browser tabs at any given point in time-most of them 2 or 3 or 5 times! That seems wrong. This question was a semi-answer to another question I had ben asking myself for years Most apps are web apps. I was standing in front of an elevator at work when I first thought of this bizarre question, or maybe more like a riddle: How can I make an app that doesn't know which app it is at compile time, doesn't rely on local storage, doesn't need an internet connection, but knows exactly which app it should become at launch time, on the user's computer?

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