App Notes: Web App Viewer

I got annoyed enough with Safari Web Apps to write my own replacement. It took about five minutes to get the core working, and maybe another hour of incremental tweaks spread over a day or so. That ratio–five minutes for the thing, an hour for the polish–tells you something about the state of the problem it solves. Web App Viewer is a tiny native macOS shell that opens a URL in a WebKit window with no browser chrome. No address bar, no tab strip, no toolbar, no Safari-style fullscreen frame. One web page, one native window, as little visible UI as macOS will reasonably allow once a page is loaded (it hides traffic lights and scrollbars when the mouse is away). You can drop URLs onto it in the Dock, send them from the Share sheet, a .webloc file, or a custom webappviewer:// URL scheme. This is it. This is the whole app WhySafari’s “Add to Dock” Web Apps have been around for a while now, and the idea is sound–pin a website as a standalone app, give it its own icon, get it out of the…