A Letterboxd desktop app: logging films in its own window

The credits are rolling, the film needs logging, and the laptop is the thing that is open. On a phone this takes fifteen seconds. On a Mac it means finding the Letterboxd tab, which by ten in the evening is somewhere in a strip of twenty, or opening a new one and typing the address for the fourth time that week. Enough repetitions of that and the diary entry stops getting made, which is the only real failure mode a film diary has.

What Letterboxd publishes, and what it does not

The apps page is short and unambiguous. It lists three destinations: iPhone and iPad on the App Store, Android on the Play Store, and Apple TV on the App Store. There is no desktop entry, no Mac download, and no note promising one.

The App Store listing for the app published by Letterboxd Ltd gives iOS 17.5 or later as its requirement, and Apple's metadata for that listing does not include Mac in its device support. That closes the route that quietly rescues a lot of services with no Mac client, where an iPhone or iPad build can be installed on Apple silicon because the developer allowed it. On a Mac there is no Letterboxd application of any kind, and the browser is not a fallback position.

It is worth pausing on the Apple TV entry, because it explains the shape of the product. Letterboxd built for the screen where films get watched and for the device that is in a pocket afterwards. A Mac is neither. It is where the writing happens, and the writing has always lived on the web.

The web version is the lead client, not the backup

This is the part that reverses the usual assumption. Most services treat the browser as the version you settle for. Letterboxd's own feature descriptions put several things on the web and nowhere else.

The Pro page, describing what an upgrade includes, lists the ability to manage tags and notes that this is done via web. In the same list, custom app icons are marked as an iOS feature. Two features, two platforms, and the tag management is the one that matters for anyone whose lists have grown past a few dozen entries.

The Patron tier goes further in the same direction.

early access to some beta features (now testing on the web: one-click addition of all visible films to a list) Source: letterboxd.com

New capability is being tested on the web first. A reader who assumes the phone app is the real product and the site is the compromise has it backwards, and that assumption is what makes the missing desktop app feel like a gap rather than a design decision.

The free tier is not thin either. The Pro page states that all accounts offer unlimited films, diary entries, reviews, ratings and lists. The paid tiers add the removal of third party ads, personalised annual and all time statistics pages, filtering by streaming services drawn from JustWatch with notifications when a watchlist film arrives, visible friend ratings, ownership tracking, activity feed filtering and profile pinning. Pro and Patron are both billed per year, and the page notes that the displayed price includes applicable sales tax and that subscriptions are powered by Paddle. The figures shown depend on the viewer's region, so the page itself is the only reliable place to read them.

What logging actually involves on a Mac

The case for a dedicated window rests on what the work is, so it is worth being specific.

A diary entry is quick: a date, a rating, a like, maybe a tag. A review is not. A review is typing, and typing several hundred words about a film is a desktop job in the same way that writing an email is. Lists are worse, in the sense of being more work: building a themed list of thirty films means searching, adding, reordering and writing a description, and doing that on a phone is an act of endurance.

Then there is everything around it. The activity feed, the friend whose review prompted a reply, the watchlist that needs filtering against what is actually streaming this month. None of it is urgent, all of it is the reason the account exists, and all of it happens in a browser on a Mac.

So the pattern is a site visited briefly and often, plus occasional long sessions of writing. That is an unusual combination, and it is precisely the combination a tab strip handles worst.

The work that only makes sense at a desk

Several of the things a Letterboxd account is actually used for are poor fits for a phone, and noticing which ones they are makes the case for a window concrete rather than a matter of taste.

Statistics are the clearest example. The Pro description lists personalised annual and all time statistics pages based on diary entries and watched films, plus statistics for any list. Reading a year of viewing history is a scanning task. It wants a wide screen, a scroll wheel and a few minutes, and it is the sort of page people screenshot and share, which means it gets opened more than once.

Watchlist management is the second. Pro allows selecting and filtering by streaming services drawn from JustWatch, with a notification when a film on the watchlist arrives on one of them. Setting that up is a configuration job across a list of services. Acting on it afterwards is a decision made while sitting down, usually with something else open in another window.

List building is the third, and it is the heaviest. The Pro feature list includes duplicating lists, which exists because people build variations on a theme, and building a themed list means searching, adding, reordering and writing a description. Nobody does that standing up.

The fourth is the one people underrate: filtering the activity feed by type, which Pro also lists. An unfiltered feed is a river. A feed filtered to reviews from people whose taste is trusted is a reading list, and turning one into the other is a few clicks made once and then relied on for months.

Every one of those four is a sit-down task on a wide screen, and every one of them is a reason the site gets opened and left open. A window that holds them is not a convenience for the fifteen second diary entry. It is where the account is actually used.

Where a tab gets in the way

Closing is one keystroke away, and a review is not saved

Cmd+W shuts the frontmost tab with no confirmation. A rating survives, because it was submitted. Four hundred words of review typed into a box and not yet posted do not. This is the single most annoying failure available in the whole arrangement, and it is entirely a property of the container.

Finding it again is a search

Twenty tabs in, the favicon is four pixels. Logging a film means scanning the strip, or opening a new tab and typing, which is more effort than the entry itself deserves. Friction at that scale does not stop a determined person once. It stops a habit over a month.

A household has more than one account

Two people, one Mac, two film diaries. In a single browser that is a sign-out and a sign-in each time, which nobody does more than twice before giving up and logging everything under one name.

	Browser tab	Safari web app	Site to app tool
Own Dock icon and Cmd+Tab slot	No	Yes	Yes
Survives Cmd+W aimed elsewhere	No	Yes	Yes
Separate sign-in from the browser	No	Yes	Yes
Second account on the same Mac	Sign in and out	Second web app, built by hand	Second window
Opens automatically at sign-in	No	Yes, as a login item	Yes
Cost	Free	Free	Varies

Building the film diary window

macOS provides a documented route at no cost, and Apple is specific about the result.

Starting with macOS Sonoma 14, you can use Safari to save any webpage as a web app, so that you can use it independently of Safari. Source: support.apple.com

In Safari the path is File then Add to Dock. Apple's page states that the web app is saved to the Applications folder of the user's home folder and opens from the Dock or from Spotlight, so it is a real item on disk rather than a bookmark in costume.

Several of the settings Apple documents are worth setting deliberately for this one. The URL can be set, so the window can open on the diary or on the activity feed rather than on a logged out home page. The name and icon are chosen freely, which for a film diary is a small pleasure rather than a chore. The navigation controls in the toolbar can be hidden, which removes the back button and address bar from a window whose job is a text box. And Apple notes that a web app can be added as a login item so it opens at sign-in, which is what turns it from a tool into part of the desk.

The detail that solves the household problem is the separation.

A web app functions independently of Safari. It shares no browsing history, cookies, website data, or settings with Safari. Source: support.apple.com

Its own cookie store means its own sign-in. One person's diary lives in the web app, the other's stays in Safari, and neither has to sign out of anything.

Where the free route stops

Two accounts is where Add to Dock starts to strain, because the trick above works exactly once. A second web app pointed at the same site is a second item to build, name and find an icon for, and a third is a third. The route is also Safari only, so a Letterboxd session that lives in Chrome has to be established somewhere new. And the window's behaviour is whatever Apple's handful of switches allow.

A site to app tool covers that ground: a window with its own session regardless of which browser holds the main one, a second window for a second account on the same host, a prepared icon, and control over how the window behaves. The supported services list shows the same pattern applied to the sites people return to several times a day, which is the category a film diary belongs to rather than the category of things opened once a month.

What to change first

Open the diary page in Safari, choose File then Add to Dock, name it after the diary rather than after the site, and hide the navigation controls so the window is a writing surface. Log the next three films in it before deciding anything else, because the test is whether the entry gets made at all. Where a second account in the house is the obstacle, Kagemusha handles the same idea with the session separation built in.