A native Mac app for screenshots, markup, OCR, and screen recording.
OwlShot lives in the menu bar. Grab an area, a window, or the whole display; the editor opens right on the capture; text comes out of the pixels on-device; recordings write straight to MP4. The whole app is a 3.7 MB download.
The whole clip is the app’s own output — every frame
rendered by the shipping build, encoded by its recording writer.
OwlShot --hero-demo
The editor opens on the capture, not in another app.
Nine tools — arrow, rectangle, ellipse, line, text, pen, highlight, blur, crop — on a palette that floats over the shot. The style capsule draws its swatches and widths as the stroke they set, and crop gets its own bar with aspect presets and a live pixel readout.
A real editor window mid-annotation: the spike boxed, the deploy
that caused it pointed at, the signing key blurred before the shot leaves the
team. Captured from the shipping build in both appearances.
OwlShot --editor-ui-proof
Crop keeps your ink
Cropping translates every annotation into the new frame — marks inside ride along, marks crossing the edge clip with it. Undo restores crop and ink as one step.
Retina honest
Exports keep full pixel resolution, and every size you see is real pixels — never scaled points.
The preview is the file
The canvas and the export run the same compositor, so what you see and what you save cannot disagree.
Captures land in a small panel and wait.
No editor window you didn’t ask for. The capture settles at the edge of the screen and stays exactly as long as you want it to.
- Drag it out as a real PNG — straight into a chat, an email, a ticket.
- Copy, save, mark up, or pin from the panel’s own controls.
- The size it shows is the size of the file. On every build, a self-test takes a real capture and fails if the caption is wrong. It exists because the caption once doubled every dimension; that class of bug stays dead.
- It leaves on your schedule — swipe it away, or let it retire itself.
Shown at its real size. The caption’s numbers are the
file’s. OwlShot --panel-preview
Copy the text out of anything on screen.
An error in a terminal, a video frame, a screenshot someone sent you. Recognition runs on your Mac, and the clipboard is written the moment the panel lands — the capture-and-paste reflex costs nothing.
- You see what it read. The result is an editable, monospaced well — fix an l/1 or O/0, and Copy re-copies your correction.
- Doubt is visible. Lines the recogniser is unsure of get an amber wash, and the header counts them.
- Emails, links, and phone numbers become chips whose label is the value itself, so a misread character is visible before it is acted on.
- Language detection is automatic, and newlines survive.
The panel over the terminal it just read — line for
line, with the registry host at the recogniser’s uncertain tier.
OwlShot --ocr-ui-proof
Two things screenshot tools get wrong.
These clips are the app’s own rendering, not an animator’s impression of it. Each one exercises the same code path that Copy and Save run.
A blur that destroys, not decorates
An early build’s blur looked redacted and wasn’t: a translucent wash over intact pixels. It was rebuilt to destroy the data, and a self-test now fails any build where contrast survives inside the blurred region. Every frame of this sweep is a real export.
OwlShot --blur-demo
A crop that keeps its ink
The 16:9 preset holds through the whole drag, the rectangle snaps flush near the image edge, and the commit carries every annotation into the new frame — the markers and the note ride along, the circled date drops with the letterhead. The drag is the live canvas; the commit is the shipping export path.
OwlShot --crop-demo
The rest of the kit.
Area, window, or display
The shortcuts you already press. One key re-grabs the previous area.
⇧⌘3 ⇧⌘4 ⇧⌘5Hotkeys with no hoops
Shortcuts register through the system’s own hotkey API. No Accessibility grant, no Input Monitoring, nothing to click through: they work on first launch.
Scrolling capture
Capture past the bottom of the page and let OwlShot stitch the pieces into one tall image.
Screen recording
Record a region or a whole display to MP4 from the menu bar. The clips on this page were encoded by that same writer.
Pin to screen
Pin a capture and it stays put while you work — compare, retype, reproduce.
Capture history
Recent captures are kept on your Mac, so closing a panel is never losing the shot.
The build, in numbers.
Everything on this page is true of the download above — same version, same signature. When a number here changes, it changes because the build did.
- Version
- 0.6.2 (build 86)
- Download
- 3.6 MB disk image — signed with a Developer ID, notarized by Apple
- Requires
- macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon or Intel
- Built on
- AppKit and ScreenCaptureKit — no Electron, no bundled runtime
- Permissions
- Screen Recording only. Hotkeys use the system hotkey API, so there is no Accessibility or Input Monitoring prompt to click through.
- Network
- License activation and update checks. There is no upload path for captures at all, and no telemetry.
- Output
- PNG captures · MP4 recordings · plain text from OCR
- Site imagery
- Rendered by the shipping build
from synthetic scenes — the flag under each shot reproduces
it:
--hero-demo,--editor-ui-proof,--ocr-ui-proof,--panel-preview,--blur-demo,--crop-demo
Quiet by construction.
Built like a Mac app
Native AppKit in a 3.7 MB download — instant from the menu bar, no runtime warming up behind it.
Captures stay on your Mac
No account, no cloud library, no share links. Text recognition runs on-device. The only network calls are license activation and update checks.
A quiet page, too
No analytics, no trackers, no third-party requests — on this site or in the app. The clips above are files on this domain, not embeds.
Not for sale yet.
OwlShot will be one subscription for every Mac you own, activated with a license key — not a login.
The price hasn’t been set; it will be announced here first. The download above is the real, current build — signed, notarized, and the same app that will ship the day checkout opens.
- No money-back theater. There is no purchase yet, so there is nothing to guarantee — and nothing to risk.
- No account, ever. Activation will be a key you paste, not a login you keep.
- Nothing to migrate away from. Captures are plain PNG and MP4 files on your disk. If OwlShot isn’t for you, leaving costs nothing.