I built a macOS menu bar app that converts files without installing anything

Every week I'd end up on some random website to turn a HEIC photo into a JPG, a Word file into a PDF, or to open a ZIP someone sent with a password. Uploading private files to a stranger's server for a two-second job always felt wrong.

The thing is, macOS already ships with almost everything you need to do these conversions locally. So I built Flip: a small menu bar app that converts files on your Mac using only what's built into macOS. No LibreOffice, no ffmpeg, no uploads.

Drag it to the menu bar

When you drag a file near Flip's menu bar icon, a little island grows out of it and "swallows" the file. Let go, and it's converted into the format you picked, saved right next to the original.

You can also drop several files at once and choose a format for each one:

It handles images (including HEIC, WebP, AVIF), PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, JSON, YAML, Markdown, audio, video, and most archive formats.

The feature I'm proudest of: PowerPoint animations

If you've ever exported a PowerPoint with animations to PDF, you know the problem. Every animated object ends up stacked on the same page, so the chart that appears on click 2 sits on top of the text from click 1.

Flip reads the animation timeline inside the .pptx, works out which objects actually overlap, and splits only those slides into one page per click. Slides without overlapping animations stay as a single page.

Archives you can look inside

Drop a ZIP, 7z, RAR or tar file and Flip opens a browser window. Preview any file, check the ones you want, and extract them, or merge them straight into one PDF. You can also drag new files into the window to add them to the archive.

If an archive needs a password, Flip first tries the passwords you've used before. They're stored in the macOS Keychain, so you never have to dig through old messages for that password someone sent you.

A few more things

• Turn a video into a GIF, or a GIF into an MP4
• Merge files into one PDF, Excel workbook or animated GIF
• Encrypt files as AES-256 ZIP, password-protected PDF or encrypted disk image
• English, Traditional Chinese and Japanese interface

How it's built

For the curious:

• Swift and SwiftUI, with AppKit for the menu bar (NSStatusItem) and the drop-zone panel. The island follows a global mouse monitor and watches the drag pasteboard, so it can react before you even reach the icon.
• Conversions use system frameworks: ImageIO for images, PDFKit for PDFs, WebKit to lay out Markdown and HTML as PDF, AVFoundation for video, afconvert for audio, and bsdtar for archives.
• Excel files are read and written directly as XML, no library needed.
• Office files: if Microsoft Office is installed, Flip drives Word, Excel and PowerPoint through AppleScript for a pixel-perfect PDF. Without Office, Word documents still convert using the text engine built into macOS.
• No Xcode project. It's built with swiftc and a shell script.

Try it

Flip is free to download, with a full 14-day trial: Download Flip

Screenshots, the user guide and release notes are all on GitHub. If you like it, a star would mean a lot:

yakiniku35 / Flip-releases

Downloads for Flip, a menu bar file converter for macOS (app builds only, no source code)

Flip

A file converter that lives in your Mac's menu bar.
Download · Website · User Guide

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Drag a file to the menu bar icon, pick a format, and Flip converts it right on your Mac with tools built into macOS. Nothing is uploaded, and there is nothing else to install.

• Images, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, data, audio and video: convert between dozens of formats
• PowerPoint to PDF without animations piling up on one page
• Archives: preview what's inside, extract only what you need, or merge files into one PDF
• Password vault: saved passwords are tried automatically on protected archives
• Animated GIFs: video to GIF, GIF to video, or merge images into an animation
• Merge, compress and encrypt files in one click

Screenshots

Drop several files, pick a format for each, and convert them in one go.	Choose where files are saved, convert on drop, and auto-extract

…

View on GitHub

After the trial, everyday conversion, extraction and compression stay free. Pro licenses, which unlock merging, encryption, the password vault and PowerPoint splitting, are coming soon.

It needs macOS 14 or later and runs on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs. Flip isn't notarized by Apple yet, so the first time you open it, go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. The user guide walks through it.

I'd love your feedback. What file conversion do you find yourself searching for most often?

Comments

[Oleksandr]

This is an absolute masterclass in native macOS software engineering. In an era where desktop apps are routinely bloated with heavy Electron wrappers or massive third-party library dependencies, building a high-performance utility like Flip that aggressively leverages system frameworks is incredibly refreshing.
Your layout demonstrates several top-tier architecture choices:

1. System Framework Orchestration: Utilizing built-in components like ImageIO, PDFKit, AVFoundation, and bsdtar is a brilliant engineering pattern. It guarantees near-zero binary overhead, flawless performance scaling, and native system stability while keeping the installer extremely lightweight.
2. Keychain Integration for UX: Storing previously used archive passwords securely inside the macOS Keychain is a beautiful UX pattern. It elevates a standard utility into a seamless, modern operating system extension by removing the friction of hunting down old strings.
3. No Xcode, Just Swiftc: Building the application strictly via swiftc and automated shell scripts is pure developer discipline. It completely removes the complex project configuration drift that plagues large Xcode configurations, keeping the pipeline perfectly reproducible. To take this native conversion pipeline even further and ensure high execution safety during dense background batches, here are two infrastructure patterns you can consider for future iterations: • Process Isolation for AppleScript Automations: When driving Word, Excel, or PowerPoint through AppleScript interfaces, external app crashes or slow document initialization can block the main app thread. Encapsulating the scripting calls inside isolated, low-priority background processes via Process() (running separate Swift helper targets or minimal background tasks) ensures that the core application UI loop stays completely responsive even if Microsoft Office hangs during a pixel-perfect export. • Decoupled Text Engine Fallbacks: For your non-Office Word conversion pipeline, the built-in macOS text engine works well but can drop complex nested table layouts. Implementing a lightweight, local streaming bridge that falls back to system-level text rendering only after checking for document complexity allows you to tag file layouts with warning boundaries before the user attempts a batch conversion. Thank you for demonstrating the raw power of pure, unadulterated Swift and native Apple API execution!