10 Best Side Hustle Ideas: How I Made $600 in One Day - Duration: 16:07. Let's Talk Money! With Joseph Hogue, CFA Recommended for you. Awesome New Mac App: Flotato. I'm really enjoying this app which makes it easy to make web apps into native Mac apps. And it does it so well! 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.
Terry Austin is back with a review of an app called Tunity that I reviewed ages ago (he’s got a different perspective). I’ll tell you about Flotato, an app that will let you run some iOS only-apps on your Mac. Then Sandy Foster tells us how to add a workout back into Apple Health if you forget to record it using your watch. I’ll tell you why I think sleep tracking is stupid. Bart Busschots is back with another installment of Security Bits.
https://media.blubrry.com/nosillacast/traffic.libsyn.com/nosillacast/NC_2019_10_06.mp3You can create mac apps from web apps in a few different ways, depending on the app you're creating. But honestly, most of the time, you just need the app overview. It's a handy collection of 50 of the most popular apps on the web, including Facebook, Messenger, Youtube. Pick a Google Sheet and Glide assembles a polished, data-driven app that you can customize, share with a link, and publish to app stores if you desire. TechCrunch The founders of Glide, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 class, had a notion that building mobile apps in the enterprise was too hard.
Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Apple Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, October 6, 2019, and this is show number 752.
Chit Chat Across the Pond
Bart finishes up our first exploration of Bootstrap 4 with a look at one its most versatile components, the so-called Card. This is one of those components that’s so generic it’s hard to describe, but once you learn about it you’ll start seeing it all over the web. Cards really are ubiquitous!
It’s important to stress that while we’re wrapping up our exploration of Bootstrap 4 with this installment, that does not mean we’ve come close to covering every feature this impressive library offers. Instead, the aim was to cover the big-picture items, and leave you with enough experience to be able to learn the rest independently by reading Bootstrap’s excellent documentation.
You can listen to the show right at Podfeet.com or in your podcatcher of choice under Chit Chat Across the Pond or Programming By Stealth.
Flotato App Mac
Blog Posts
Tunity app review REVISITED – by Terry Austin
Flotato Brings (Some) iOS Apps to the Mac
Apple Health: How to Add a Forgotten Workout – by Sandy Foster
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/3/4/2/134246507/232076300.jpg)
Support the Show
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The good news is that there is such a way, and it’s easy and relatively painless. If you go to podfeet.com/patreon you can become a patron of the Podfeet Podcasts. It’s like being a patron of the arts. You can support podcasters like me to help keep the show free from ads and keep the quality up. To become a patron, just click the red button and figure out a dollar amount per show that reflects your undying gratitude for the work we do here.
Now don’t you feel better?
Sleep Tracking is Stupid
I really expected to get a lot of negative responses to this article, but so far I’ve gotten general agreement. Even people who love sleep tracking and love the quantified self admit that they can’t really figure out how to do anything about it just because they’re tracking.
My favorite response came from Eric. He wrote this comment on the blog post:
Allison, as a sleep tech, I applaud your analysis. People who have symptoms of restless leg or sleep apnea should get checked out in a lab. Other sleep tracking is fun, but doesn’t really change outcomes. As long as you don’t drink Mountain Dew before you go to bed (seen it), eat hot wings in bed (seen it), or get wasted before you g to bed (saw it Thursday night), besides giving yourself enough time to sleep (very few people do) there is very little we can do to affect our sleep.
That said, some doctors and insurance companies will be moving patients to sleep testing using Apple Watch over the next few years because it will save time and money. In-lab studies and even the home tests are clunky and patients often struggle to adjust to the change in their environment that the study adds. We affect the test by testing. The Apple Watch will be a perfect solution…once Apple adds the needed accoutrement for testing restless leg, blood O2, and breathing patterns. It is inevitable like self-driving cars.
I love this response because he knows what he’s talking about; he’s not just some dork with a microphone like me spouting opinions. Secondly I want to emphasize that I don’t believe sleep tracking will be stupid forever. As the tools evolve and the professional studies continue, we’ll get a better grasp of what causes us to lose sleep and be able to track both the root causes and the results.
I kidded around at the end of the article about David Smith having an app called Sleep++. I did download and install it. It’s free, but he invites you to give him $2 because he’s awesome so I paid the $2.
I tracked two night’s sleep and remember since we find ourselves fascinating, I’m convinced that my results will be fascinating to you, so I’m going to tell you about them. I also think the results are pretty funny.
On Friday, I got a Shingles vaccine. The vaccine is known to have some pretty nasty side effects, but Shingles is a hideous illness and a few days of discomfort is worth getting vaccinated. It’s a two-dose vaccine, and other than feeling like I’d been punched in the arm by Mike Tyson, I had no other side effects. But on Friday night when I went to bed, I was convulsed with shivering. It was horrible. I couldn’t get to sleep and I was miserable most of the night. I got up at 3:30 and took my temperature and it was 102F. I took some aspirin and finally went into a fitful sleep. I awoke in the morning with no fever, but I clearly was sleep-deprived. I even took a mid-morning nap to try to recover some of what I’d lost. So that was my Friday night story.
Saturday night I went to bed feeling great and had a fabulous night’s sleep. I went to bed a little later than usual so it was only 7 hours, but I woke up feeling great.
Now here’s the funny part. According to Sleep++ as recorded by my Apple Watch, I had 6h 52m of restful sleep on the night I had a 102F fever, and 6h and 25 m (27 min less) sleep on the night I felt great.
In other words, I’m standing by my statement, Sleep tracking is stupid.
Security Bits – 5 October 2019
That’s going to wind this up for this week. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter @podfeet. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com/. podfeet.com/patreon, podfeet.com/facebook, podfeet.com/slack! And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.
The Problem to be Solved
One of my pet peeves in app development right now is how many services only work on mobile. I know I’m an old lady but I really like to type and interact with the world via a big-girl keyboard on a real computer. Don’t get me wrong, you couldn’t pry my phone out of my cold, dead hands, but if I can type for real, I’m going to do it.
A shining example of this annoyance is Instagram. I want to be a good Instagrammer, but being restricted to only using my iPhone is irritating as all get out. The worst part is that Instagram actually works via the web interface at instagram.com, but there’s no plus button so you can only look at other people’s content; you can’t add your own.
A shining example of this annoyance is Instagram. I want to be a good Instagrammer, but being restricted to only using my iPhone is irritating as all get out. The worst part is that Instagram actually works via the web interface at instagram.com, but there’s no plus button so you can only look at other people’s content; you can’t add your own.
Last year I did a blog post entitled How to Use Instagram from a Real Computer that gave you a little trick to fix this problem. If you enable the developer mode in Safari (or use the already available developer mode in Firefox), you can change the User Agent Switcher to iPhone, thereby tricking sites like Instagram into thinking you’re on a mobile device. As soon as you do this, you get the Plus button. Even with this trick, you don’t get access to Instagram Stories.
![App App](/uploads/1/3/4/2/134246507/979577664.png)
This is an annoying hack and I don’t like that I have to do that just to play with the cool kids. Instagram isn’t the only site doing this.
You may remember back in November of 2009 on episode 233 when Bart Busschots told us about Fluid, an app that would allow you to create site-specific browser instances.
There’s a new kid in town called Flotato from flotato.com that creates site-specific browsers, but It creates the iOS versions of those web apps. With the iOS versions on your Mac, you can run many of the applications not made for the Mac.
Flotato is free for 2 apps and if you want or need more, a full license is $19. This works out pretty well because if you’re really only irritated by Instagram not having the darn plus button, you can get a completely functional version for your Mac through Flotato for free. But if you find you really like having lots of web services in their own little apps, you can shell out a few bucks and go bananas with all the options.
Adding Apps
When you launch Flotato, you’ll see a grid of pretty app icons and their names, each with a “Get” button below it. The apps chosen for Flotato don’t by any means encompass all of the mobile apps in the world, but it does seem to have a lot of the usual suspects that you might want. Here’s how Flotato works. We’ll use Instagram for the explanation. Ready? It’s super complicated.
Click on the Get button under Instagram and in about 0.2 seconds, the Get button turns to Open. Click it. In about 0.15 seconds, Instagram opens up in a window on your Mac. Log into Instagram and you’re ready to play.
Instagram now acts like any other app on your Mac. You can see it in your Applications folder with its normal icon just like on the phone. You can put the icon in the dock. You can launch via Spotlight or Launchpad. Instagram has the plus button at the bottom and Instagram stories at the top and functions exactly like Instagram on iOS. And you created it virtually instantly with Flotato. Isn’t that crazy?
There’s only one way you can tell the difference between this app and a “real” app. At the top left of your screen, instead of saying Instagram, it says Flotato. But when you quit the app, it doesn’t quit all of the Flotatos, only the one Flotato app you’re currently using.
If you use Facebook, even against your will, how annoying is it that on the desktop, Facebook Messenger is this irritating little tiny sub-window on the page in Safari? Flotato’s got a Facebook Messenger app so you can interact with Messenger without firing up Facebook and getting sucked into non-productivity.
Remember when we had a Twitter client on the Mac? I never used it because I’m a Tweetbot fan, but a lot of people were irritated when it disappeared. With Flotato, you can have what feels exactly like the Twitter app back on your Mac.
Some apps show up in Flotato but are marked as “Not Flotato”. That seems pretty weird but I think I understand why they say that. Discord, Slack and the other apps marked as Not Flotato are actually already web apps, so Flotato doesn’t need to recreate them. Not sure why they didn’t just skip including them though.
Make Your Own
If you have a web app you enjoy and it’s not available in Flotato natively, you can make your own Flotato app. Let’s say you’re super excited about the new button on podfeet.com that takes you directly to Security Bits. It turns out that button just takes you to the url: podfeet.com/blog/category/security-bits/. You could make an app that is dedicated to reading your favorite security updates blog.
The first “app” in the Flotato interface says Make Your Own. If you select the Start button under it, you get a couple of easy-to-answer questions. The first is the web address, and we already know that. Then you make up a name for this new application you’re creating. Finally you choose whether you want your web app to be the desktop or mobile version.
As you enter this information, there’s a little window that will show you what it would look like when it’s really running. This can be especially helpful if you want to flip back and forth between the desktop and mobile options. I think the ability to roll your own is how you’ll end up wanting to pay the developer for such a useful app. You could even make a web app called Amazon that in reality went to podfeet.com/amazon!
With a home-made Flotato instance, you can create a square slice of the screen and keep it active in your dock. That sounds nutty but in some instances, it’s pretty handy. We have a weather station, so I created a Flotato App that shows the weather at our house. Then I made a slice of just the temperature, and now I can see the temp outside right in my dock.
Flotato App For Mac Computer
The way you create these little slices is very odd. With your new web app open, in the menu bar under App, you choose Dock Monitor Active. Then on the web app, you’re invited to drag your monitoring area. They want you to drag across a square area. Once you do that, the dock icon for that app will show the area you chose to monitor real time. It’s pretty cool. I undid it though to follow the steps again and I couldn’t get it to work a second time. Probably operator trouble.
Bottom Line
Flotato is a really cool service that solves some real problems for me. It’s wicked fast to create apps, I finally have a functional Instagram app, I can use Facebook Messenger when I must as a floating app, and I can create my own web apps. These apps are just little WebKit windows so they are super responsive.
If you want to try it out for free, go for it, and if you get great value out of Flotato, it’s only $19 at Flotato.com. After figuring out everything Flotato could do in order to write up this review, I bought Flotato myself.