Why I Built Floatie Instead of Using Fuwari
I kept what I liked about Fuwari and filled in the parts I missed myself. The story behind Floatie, a Mac menu bar screenshot utility.
Every time I captured something on my Mac, saving it as a file and opening it again felt like a detour. Fuwari was where I first saw a capture stay on the screen as a floating piece instead of disappearing into a file, and I liked the idea immediately. I’m in the habit of keeping reference material beside my work, so it fit the way I already worked.
The trouble came next. To use those floating pieces more comfortably, I wanted to change how they looked and how they were saved — and that meant building the app myself. That’s how Floatie started.
What I kept, what I changed — three things
Selecting a screen region stayed as it was. Floatie uses the built-in /usr/sbin/screencapture binary, the same approach Fuwari has shipped with on the App Store for years. Using the system binary instead of a custom overlay means no pixel contamination.
What changed is how the shot itself looks. I gave shots a rounded border so they stand out on screen, and made their opacity adjustable so you can keep referring to one without hiding the window behind it.
The third is saving. I added drag out: take a finished shot, drop it into Finder or any other app, and it saves. All three were things I missed myself while living with floating shots.
From skeleton to Pro
Floatie’s first commit is dated 25 April 2026. Domain entities, DI, the permission manager, shortcuts, region selection, capture, the first floating shot, and the menu bar wiring — the skeleton was up in a day or two. Text recognition (OCR) went in the very next day.
Ghost mode arrived in early May, and on 10 May came screen recording, in-app language selection, and accessibility and RTL improvements. June brought matching scroll direction between mouse and trackpad, and the cute float; Pro, the trial, and the purchase logic all started then too. On 10 June the App Store release pipeline ran clean for the first time.
After that came localization and polish. In July the Pro product copy went into several languages and the settings screen was rebuilt; the interface now ships in more than 90 languages. Lately I’ve been running QA cycles over accessibility items — contrast, VoiceOver, RTL.
Why App Store only, and why sandboxed
Floatie ships through the App Store only, with the sandbox and hardened runtime on. Leaving screen selection to the built-in macOS binary follows from that decision: using an already-proven path, with no extra permissions or custom overlay, means fewer things to argue about in review.
Even inside the sandbox I kept the entitlements to a minimum: reading and writing files, the network client, and camera and microphone for recording. Screen capture itself needs the macOS screen recording permission, so onboarding asks for that first.
Narrowing the distribution to one path was the trade; in exchange I wanted what’s inside it to be as safe as possible.
Floatie today
Region and full-screen capture, floating shots, resizing, and opacity are free and stay free. Window capture, scrolling capture, text recognition, drag out, and recording are Pro — try them through the 14-day trial, and one purchase keeps them (not a subscription).
Floatie is what came of starting from Fuwari and widening it into the shape I wanted.
Ready to float?
Free for 14 days with everything unlocked. Then one one-time purchase — Floatie Pro — for life. Not a subscription.