Getting started

Ploof Studio is a Mac app that turns a sentence into a website. You describe the site, it writes the pages while you watch, and the preview fills in beside the chat. Then you keep talking to change anything, or point at an element in the preview and say what it should be instead.

Three promises shape everything it does.

• You own the code. Every site is plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There is no Ploof Studio code inside and nothing to build, so the files run in any browser and on any host.
• Everything stays on your Mac. Your projects, conversations, and keys live in a folder on this Mac.
• Ploof Studio never hosts your site. You put it online on an account you own, through GitHub, Vercel, or a ZIP you upload anywhere. You can export it at any moment.

Ploof Studio comes with Setapp. It runs on macOS 12 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel.

1. Open Setapp

   Sign in to Setapp on your Mac if you haven’t yet. Ploof Studio uses the Setapp AI credits of the Setapp account on this Mac.

2. Install Ploof Studio

   Find Ploof Studio in Setapp and install it.

3. Open it

   Open Ploof Studio. On the first launch it shows a short tour.

The tour has seven short steps. Each one shows a small animated scene of a feature: building a site, Point, borrowing a look from another site, models, and deploying. The last step lists the shortcuts that cover most of the app.

• Select Continue to move on and Back to go back.
• Select Skip tour in the top right, or press Esc, to close it at any time.
• On the last step, select Start building.

The tour shows once. Skipping it or finishing it means it won’t come back.

1. Describe the site

   On the home screen, under What should Ploof Studio build?, write one or two sentences in the prompt bar. Say what the site is for and who it’s for, for example “A one-page site for Sunny Cups, a lemonade stand that caters summer parties.”

2. Send it

   Press Enter or select Send. Ploof Studio creates a project, names it, and starts writing.

3. Watch it build

   Each file appears in the chat as Ploof Studio writes it, and the preview on the right shows the site as soon as the first page is saved.

4. Ask for changes

   In the prompt bar, which now says Describe a change…, say what to change in plain words. Or turn on Point in the preview and select the element you mean.

Every project is a folder of plain files on your Mac, at ~/Library/Application Support/Ploof/projects/. Conversations are stored next to them in ploof.db.

To take a copy of a site anywhere, open Deploy and choose Download ZIP. The archive holds every page, stylesheet, script, and image of the project. Deploy your site covers the other ways to put it online.