Shoverlay

I take screenshots all day. Bugs, UI reviews, a weird error on a client’s machine, a paragraph I want to OCR instead of retype. On a Mac that should be boring infrastructure. It isn’t.

The built-in tool still feels like 2007: capture, dump a file on the desktop, open Preview, crop, annotate, export. The paid tools that do feel modern are excellent — and also closed, pricey, and opinionated in ways I kept fighting. I wanted something that lives in the menu bar, wakes up with a shortcut, and gets out of the way.

So I started Shoverlay.

It’s a Mac-only capture tool from Kingfont: area, window, fullscreen, last area. Scrolling capture for pages that don’t fit on one screen. OCR. Screen recording to MP4/MOV, plus GIF and WebP. An annotator. Pin a shot above other windows. History. Optional cloud links. The unglamorous stuff that makes a capture usable — hide desktop icons, swap the wallpaper so your messy Dock doesn’t leak into a client screenshot.

I’m not pretending the category is empty. CleanShot X already won a lot of that market. Shottr is fast and cheap. I’m not trying to “disrupt screenshots.” I’m trying to build the one I reach for without thinking.

The part that ate me: scrolling capture.

You’d think “take frames while the page moves, glue them together.” In practice the page is never a clean strip of unique pixels. Trackpads scroll in fractional points. Text is high-contrast and repetitive. Title bars and scrollbars don’t move with the content. Auto-scroll has to stop when the pointer leaves the selection, then continue when it comes back. On modern macOS the reliable continuous capture path is ScreenCaptureKit, not the old window-list screenshot API — and you can’t run both at once without poisoning the stitch.

I spent a ridiculous number of hours on a page of The Catcher in the Rye in a dark text editor. Dense monospaced white-on-black. Almost no landmarks. If your stitcher locks 32 rows to the bottom of the canvas and that lock fails once, it never re-anchors. You get a two-frame image and a very quiet rage.

That’s the job, though. Screenshot apps are judged on the 2% of captures that used to fail.

OCR has the same kind of trap. Apple Vision is great at English by default. “Automatically detect language” in the settings did not put Chinese first in the recognizer. For CJK, the language list order actually matters. I learned that the way you learn most of this: a user (me) pasted garbage and assumed the model was broken.

I’m shipping the unsexy path: shortcuts, a freeze-screen overlay, a magnifier if you want pixel-perfect edges, record-to-GIF without opening a separate converter. If it needs three apps, I failed.

I don’t have a hockey-stick chart to attach. I’m an indie, building this in the open, on macOS, because that’s the machine I work on and the one I can taste-test every hour.

If you use a Mac and capture for a living — support, design, docs, indie support tickets — I’d love to know what still feels stupid in your current tool. The features I’m proud of are the ones that disappeared into muscle memory. The ones I’m still fighting are scrolling pages and mixed-language OCR.

Shoverlay. Menu bar. One shortcut. Then back to work.