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Show HN: I made a macOS app to let me draw on the screen while on video calls
- prithsr 6y agoThis is really nice, buying it right now. Would like for an option to take a screenshot from this app itself, as opposed to Mac OS X's native screenshot taker. i.e. if I have a power point presentation open up that I'm "drawing" on top of, would like an option to screenshot/record my screen, so I can save whatever annotations I have made. Also would like to be able to add text boxes and type (as an addition).
- rampatra 6y agoMay I ask what's the harm with Mac's native screenshot taker? Even if I include it in Presentify, you would have to press a hotkey to capture so, from a user experience point of view I do not see a difference.
- felipebueno 6y agoDoes anyone know an app like that for linux?
- rasso 6y agoAlso check out https://screen.so/ https://screen.so/. It's free and works great. Was posted on HN a while ago.
- alt3red 6y agoNot only is this great software, but the fact that it did not ask for overreaching permissions and did not try to connect to 5 different websites on the first run made it an instant win for me.
- rampatra 6y agoThanks a lot for the feedback. It won't now and it never will in the future because I too hate that :)
- rampatra 6y agoThis is my first macOS app that I launched yesterday. Really excited to share it with you all. The app is called Presentify and it lets you better explain yourself during presentations or while working from home via video calls, etc. Given that most of us are now working from home, I thought this might be helpful to some. Here are the links: * Website: https://presentify.compzets.com https://presentify.compzets.com * Demo: https://youtu.be/CTR1iAbGhjg https://youtu.be/CTR1iAbGhjg * Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/presentify/id1507246666 https://apps.apple.com/app/presentify/id1507246666 Please, feel free to share your feedback. It would mean a lot to me.
- vehemenz 6y agoIs it available on Homebrew? A lot of us avoid the App Store...
- rampatra 6y agoI am not sure how the payment thing would work on homebrew. I will have to look at this.
- _venkatasg 6y agoI’ll share it with my friends and advisors who are doing a lot of remote teaching at the moment. Unfortunately, I don’t think many of them would pay for software :/ It looks like a great app though, I might check it out!
- rampatra 6y agoI have 3 promo codes that I can share here. You can use one on the Mac App Store and install the app for free. I hope that it helps. All the best! Promo codes: 9AJ6FWEEAAJK L9K9XKKKEPRA KXMYAJNA7HYA
- TMWNN 6y agoCodes are all used, but thank you for providing them (and developing the app)!
- firloop 6y agoHow does this fare with the Apple Pencil via Sidecar? Would definitely try this out if it works well.
- MarkMc 6y agoI've been looking for something like this for months! It's so painful using Zoom annotation tools with a mouse
- rampatra 6y agoThis is a great idea. I was wondering how could teachers draw on their iPad and show it on their laptop. I just gave it a try on my iPad 7th gen and my MacBook (running macOS Catalina) and it worked great. One thing to keep in mind though, when I connected my iPad to my mac via sidecar, many of the menu bar apps got hidden due to lack of space on my menu bar. So, I had to start the "Annotate Screen" via keyboard shortcut.
- rampatra 6y agoI will update the description on the app store that this works. Thanks again!
- catketch 6y agoI imagine it would work w/ Astropad if you aren't on Catalina for Sidecar edit: I tried it w/ Astropad.... works great
- modernerd 6y agoWorks well with Sidecar when mirroring on iPad Pro. The only thing I found is that the hit targets for the pen colors and clear screen button are perhaps a little small to tap with a pencil; I ended up drawing on the buttons accidentally a few times. Switching colors with the keyboard shortcuts (1/2/3) and clearing with the c key works fine alongside the pencil, though. I also instinctively tried to tap two fingers on the iPad as an “undo stroke” command, as that's how other iPad drawing apps often work, but that obviously does nothing in this case at the moment. It would be useful to have an “undo stroke” shortcut in the app so users could map to the shortcut from a gesture (not sure Sidebar supports that but I think AstroPad does: https://astropad.com/magic-gestures/ https://astropad.com/magic-gestures/ ).
- xhruso00 6y ago+ 10.12+ + AppKit Suggestions: - screenshots are too small and on 10.14 video preview is missing - touchbar support - as someone suggested, if you demo sidecar + pencil you will get featured if your app is translated to 5-6 languages
- kristianp 6y agoWhat did you write it in, out of curiosity? Obj-C and Carbon?
- rampatra 6y agoI wrote it in Swift 5.1 and used Carbon APIs for some features.
- timmins 6y agoThis looks great and will come in very useful when presenting visual concepts (keep the audience focused). One suggestion for future improvement would be auto shape snapping. I assume most will use this with a mouse which can result in squiggly, unsightly lines. A number of iOS note taking apps detect a similar shape and snap to straight lines or perfect circles. Hope that helps and thanks for the app.
- rampatra 6y agoThanks for your valuable points. I am currently developing these features and would likely come in the next update. You could easily draw straight lines, arrows, circles, and rectangles.
- busymom0 6y agoCan I ask you a question regarding the "auto starts on login" feature? I have been working on that feature on an app I have but my app simply doesn't want to start on login. I don't even know how to troubleshoot it as nothing gets logged to the system.log using the console app. I used this tutorial but not sure why it won't work: https://theswiftdev.com/how-to-launch-a-macos-app-at-login/ https://theswiftdev.com/how-to-launch-a-macos-app-at-login/ Did you face any issues too? Any thing I can use to troubleshoot?
- rampatra 6y agoI used this tutorial and it worked for me https://medium.com/@hoishing/adding-login-items-for-macos-7d76458f6495 https://medium.com/@hoishing/adding-login-items-for-macos-7d... but I had to do a small change which I have commented on this article. Or you can simply use this https://github.com/sindresorhus/LaunchAtLogin https://github.com/sindresorhus/LaunchAtLogin
- saagarjha 6y agoAre you registering your login item helper application with Launch Services?
- busymom0 6y agoCould you please elaborate on that? How would I do that? Right now I am using `SMLoginItemSetEnabled` to set my helper app and returns `true` as the returned status. The helper even seems to launch my main app just fine if I run the helper alone. But it doesn't work after login :( I did try running `lsregister -dump` but it returns a massive database and I have no idea how to even filter it for my app only.
- saagarjha 6y agoCan you try lsregister -f on your app and its helper and see if that helps?
- whytaka 6y agoAs someone leading remote colleagues on UI/UX work, this was an instant buy for me. Congratulations!
- rampatra 6y agothank you! Hope you enjoy using it :)
- emacdona 6y agoWish you had posted this yesterday! I could have used it this morning. I bought a copy so I could use it for a presentation on Friday. Thank you for making it! Suggestion: Make the diameter of the cursor highlight an option I can tweak.
- rampatra 6y agoThanks a lot! Point noted.
- j45 6y agoThis looks great, congrats. Would love to see this on the iPad as well, know of a few corporate users looking for it. Happy to chat offline.
- rampatra 6y agoThanks for the comment. Sure, I would be more than happy to chat. You can get in touch with me via the chat widget on the website https://presentify.compzets.com/ https://presentify.compzets.com/ Looking forward to it.
- kamilszybalski 6y agoThanks for this, well worth $3.61 CDN.
- rampatra 6y agoYou're welcome :) Hope you enjoy using it!
- gtm1260 6y agoAwesome work! Well worth the price for a nice, simple utility I feel like I will use everyday.
- rampatra 6y agoThanks a million :)
- plainOldText 6y agoNice presentation website. I've also just tried your app. I think it needs an exit button. It's not obvious how to exit it (unless you know the shortcut) once you activate it.
- rampatra 6y agohey, thank you so much. The exit button is on the menu bar icon itself. One does not need to remember key shortcuts to exit. You can simply tap on the menu bar icon and then click "Stop Annotating Screen". Hope it helps.
- plainOldText 6y agoI have auto-hiding menu bar turn on, thus I cannot click on it once Presentify is activated. I was thinking of an exit button next to the eraser/color picker.
- phaemon 6y agoHee hee...so I can draw devil horns and moustaches on my co-workers in boring meetings? Excellent! "helps you give better presentations by letting you annotate any screen, highlight your cursor, and more" Awww...
- rampatra 6y agoHaha, I did that once while I was testing the app and our video conferencing app froze for a couple of mins :)
- dangero 6y agoI find myself wanting this every morning. How long ago did you start the app? It seems like the perfect time to launch it being that everyone is home. I just bought it and will be using it tomorrow AM. Works great.
- psandersen 6y agoCongrats on the launch! Its hard for us with a very mixed tech stack to realise something like this. I've started thinking about using VNC to share Autodesk Sketchbook from my Surface Pro to do presentations and splicing it together with my webcam using OBS for meetings. If anyone has done something similar I'd love to hear it, main workstation is linux.
- altharaz 6y agoGreat app, I just bought it and I will try it on the next WebEx conference calls :). Some remarks: - the "Highlight cursor at app launch" has a "Start sdf sdfsdf" tooltip - I can not change the keyboard shortcuts (when I click on the button to configure them, nothing happens) - the default keyboard shortcut "Control + Option + A" presented in the menu does not work on French keyboards and requires instead to push "Control + Option + Q", which looks like a AZERTY / QWERTY configuration issue?
- dgorges 6y ago> - I can not change the keyboard shortcuts (when I click on the button to configure them, nothing happens) It seems this is currently not possible. Would also be important to me.
- rampatra 6y agoYes, that's correct. Custom shortcuts isn't implemented yet. I will enable it after I add the different drawing shapes. Thanks for bringing this up. This helps me in prioritizing features.
- maktattengil 6y agoJust bought it and it looks great! One feature that Slack's video call has that would be nice to add is to have the possibility to auto-fade what you've drawn. Lets say if you haven't drawn something within 5 sec, what you've drawn slowly fades away.
- rampatra 6y agoThanks for supporting it. The auto-erase/disappear feature is already there. You can set it in the Preferences. However, I will add the fade animation to it soon.
- maktattengil 6y agoAhh my bad! Great work!
- contingencies 6y agoUsed to use something like this all the time in compiz fusion with a graphics tablet, before spinning the 3D desktop around with a key combination and firing up some completely different workload on the rear face of the cube. Ahh, those were the days. Seriously though, if you like writing on the screen and haven't got a graphics tablet yet, get one. It's like a revelation if you do most of anything that is mouse intensive, and your future arthritic hands will thank you for it. Also check out https://github.com/bk138/gromit-mpx https://github.com/bk138/gromit-mpx
- sp0ck 6y agoNice app, just bought it. One feature request - when using touchpad there should be some key to activate annotation/drawing. It's hard to draw on touchpad while pressing it.
- rampatra 6y agoThis would be a very useful feature. Will look into it. I have seen this in document signing apps. So, I think it should be doable.
- mritchie712 6y agofeature request: ability to write text on the screen
- rampatra 6y agoFeedback noted!
- eettu 6y agoAny comparison notes with the similar app "DemoPro - Screen Annotation"?
- rampatra 6y agoSorry, I haven't used the app and can't find much from the limited screenshots on the app store. But from whatever is available I see it has a timer and Presentify has a cursor highlighter instead. The different shapes are coming in the next release to Presentify so I am not considering it for the comparison now.