Live Data, Local Files: Inside the Frappe Shelf
Frappe is the shelf labeled Connectivity & Data Tools, which sounds like the corner of the menu that phones home. It is the opposite: live prices, flights, and satellites stream in all day, and your files never leave the machine.
Frappe is the shelf labeled "Connectivity & Data Tools," which sounds like the corner of the menu that would phone home. It's actually the opposite. Frappe is where live feeds come in and your data stays put. The apps on it pull prices, flights, satellites, and news from the public internet all day, and none of them need your files to leave the machine in return.
Live prices, no account
TickerBar puts stock, ETF, and crypto prices in your menu bar. There's no account to make and no API key to paste; it reads public feeds. Prices are remembered between launches, so real numbers are on screen before the first refresh, and when a feed goes quiet it shows the last known price with its timestamp instead of an error box. It even knows when the market is shut: stocks rest overnight and on weekends while crypto keeps ticking.
DemoTrading is the practice room. Real Binance prices stream in, but the money is fake. Every account is a .trade file you save wherever you like; double-click to reopen it, copy it to back it up, run three accounts in separate windows. Limit orders rest until price reaches them, and your balance is reserved while they wait. A simulated 0.10% fee applies on both sides, so wins and losses look like the real thing, and a Stats tab tracks equity curve, win rate, and drawdown. When you reset, the file is the only thing that changes.
The sky, on your side of the glass
FlightTrack draws live air traffic on a 3D globe. Aircraft are colored by phase of flight and keep moving between refreshes instead of teleporting, and you pan and zoom to request exactly the window you're watching, not the whole planet.
GlobeSiphon tracks those aircraft plus 3,344 satellites at real altitudes. It has an offline snapshot mode, so a saved scene still renders without a connection, and a time-warp that runs 1,800x, letting you watch a full orbit in under a minute. Both apps read public sky data and send nothing back.
Files that are already yours
The rest of the shelf is about data that was yours before the app arrived, kept in shapes any tool can open.
ContactCafe is a document editor for contact files. Open the .vcf or .csv you already have, edit it properly, and save it back where it was. Photos, unique IDs, and unknown-app fields survive an edit untouched, and groups live in the same file, ready to travel. Nothing gets imported into another silo to be trapped.
FileSteep is a file manager with previews for almost anything, content search, and a terminal docked in the same window. FileSearch pulls results instantly because it leans on the operating system's index; there's no first-run scan to wait through. PersonalCRM keeps birthdays, stay-in-touch nudges, and gift ideas on one daily page, and PrivateMedia locks photos and videos in a password-encrypted vault. LatteSEO audits your website the way a search engine would and writes the report to a CSV you can open anywhere, all on your own machine.
What the shelf is really for
The live-data apps on this shelf lean hard on the internet, on purpose. TickerBar and DemoTrading only work because Binance publishes market data, and FlightTrack needs OpenSky's feed. The direction of the traffic is the point: these apps borrow information from the world and never ask for yours in return.
That distinction matters when a service changes or disappears. An account living in someone else's cloud can be closed, rate-limited, or redesigned out from under you. A .trade file, a .vcf, a CSV audit report: those stay openable no matter what happens to the app that made them.
Frappe is the deepest shelf on the menu at 19 apps, and it keeps growing fastest. It's also the one people most often assume is the cloud corner. Spend an afternoon with TickerBar and that assumption falls apart: prices tick in all day, and your disk stays exactly as it was. The local-first explainer puts the same test to the whole menu, and the cloud-prison post argues why file ownership beats server access.
The whole menu (122 apps and counting), Frappe included, is one subscription: Solo Cup at $9.99 a month, or Family Roast at $15.99 for five devices, with annual billing at roughly half. Every app runs native and works offline. Start your 7-day free trial, no credit card required, and browse the shelf yourself.