Flotato For Mac

More and more apps and services are available only on the web, for various reasons, including ease of development, cross-platform support, accessibility, and so on. However, using apps as browser tabs is far from an elegant solution, and our browsers are quickly getting overcrowded.

Flotato offers a solution to the 'apps as tabs' conundrum, allowing you to turn these web services into classic macOS desktop apps, and then access them from your Dock, outside of your browser. A considerable number of these apps are available right off the bat, and you can also create your own.

While it's easy to understand why developers are increasingly relying on web technologies, no one wants to have multiple browser tabs open for various web apps that could easily have been made into native macOS applications.

So how does Flotato turn them into desktop apps? Well, it uses the native macOS WebKit, which leads to both smaller apps and smoother performance than in the case of 'nativefiers' that rely on Electron, with its unnecessarily high resource usage.

Another great advantage Flotato offers is that the whole process is incredibly straightforward. For most popular services, the only thing you have to do is find them in the main window and click Get. A new app will be created in the Applications folder, with an appropriate icon.

If the web page you're interested in isn't on the list, you can create a new app yourself. Just type the address, give it a name, and specify if it should use the desktop or mobile version of the website; this setting can be changed later on as well.

I've used similar applications before, but I always got the feeling that something wasn't quite right with the apps I created from websites. Maybe they were sluggish, the UI didn't look quite right, settings weren't saved properly, or navigation was troublesome.

With Flotato, everything just seems right. I tried many of the default apps, and created some of my own, and they all felt as responsive and seamless as any dedicated desktop app. Of course, you aren't going to get quite the same level of optimization as you would, for instance, from an app written in Swift, but it's pretty damn close.

In a nutshell, if there are any web apps or websites that you would like to turn into classic desktop apps, Flotato is probably the best way to do it. It is incredibly easy to use, and it creates well-optimized and lightweight apps.