Posted by tomaszsobota 1 day ago
I'm happy to announce we've finally released our 2nd macOS app, Draw Over It, a tiny desktop app that enables drawing, highlighting, or annotating directly on top of anything on your Mac.
I've always wanted something like this for instant and unobtrusive sketching and annotation for pair programming and demos. I always found the standard web-based diagram and drawing tools a bit too cumbersome. So we built a simple overlay that could appear over any window or app with one shortcut.
It doesn't collect any user data and doesn't require any system permissions - it's sandboxed. It all stays on your device. You can export your annotations to a PNG with one click - or just take a screenshot if you need the background too.
It offers a slim but functional toolkit for every day tasks:
- Global hotkeys, hit a shortcut and start drawing over any app
- Multiple tools, pens, shapes, highlighters
- Per-screen canvases, each monitor gets its own space
- Focus mode, temporarily blur the background to emphasize what matters
- Low footprint, no subscriptions, no sign-ups, no data collected
- Localization, the app is translated to 14 languages
These two reasons make it different from other canvas apps, it's simple, lean and keeps your data on-device only.
It’s a one-time purchase ($2.99) on the Mac App Store.
I’d love feedback and suggestions for improvements!
I’m curious if the annotation handles things like scrolling within a webpage. That would be a really cool feature if annotations automatically moved with the scroll.
I won't be able to make it app-aware, given the very rigid security posture (complete sandbox), but I may be able to make it scroll-aware, so at least within the same window it'd move relative to the 'global' position. I'll look into it :)
I tried to strike a balance, original videos felt a bit too distracting with unfiltered cursor movements.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22938604
I am very excited to try Draw Over It—thank you for sharing. I speak at several conferences a year, and also do online workshops and training, and Presentify has been a godsend.
However, the one limitation is if you toggle it, you lose your annotations. And you can't do anything with the underlying app—can't scroll or click buttons. Looking forward to trying this out.
On macOS you can just use the global hotkey or the app menu, on iPad I'd have to wire it up somehow else - supper happy to get ideas on what would feel seamless and unobtrusive for you. I'll definitely implement it then!