Show HN: I made a macOS app to let me draw on the screen while on video calls

One suggestion: don’t use Twitter as your support/contact system. I don’t have an account with them, don’t want an account with them, and so it’s a turnoff to think I might not have a good way of providing feedback or get support if I paid for this product.

Is it drawing inside of the window, or is it at a fixed point on the screen? As in, if I underline text and then scroll down, does the underline scroll down with the text? What if I dragged the window to the left or right? I only watched the YouTube video and there was no scrolling (or dragging) while a drawing was visible in the demo, so guessing no?

Out of curiosity what is Compzets.com that's linked from the app, is it the author's company or it's just an ad?

couple of things:

when screen annotation off, two finger scrolling gestures don't work (though scrolling with arrow keys for example still does). Not sure if that was intentional

It would be nicer if the erase tool was a real eraser, and not just a way to clear the full screen (since turning off annotations already does that anyway

- When I draw, I can't scroll anymore.

- When I draw, I can't quit. The button to open the menu doesn't work and I see no button to exit.

I ended up with CMD + Q to close the application. I now see there's shortcuts in the menu, but I wouldn't rely on shortcuts for operations. In my opinion, shortcuts are shortcuts for buttons, not a substitute.

1. Make the color/clear buttons a little larger. The hit targets are very small at the moment when using a Pencil on iPad. It's easy to draw on the buttons by mistake when you mean to press them.

2. Add a “stop annotating screen” button to the buttons, separated by some space so it's harder to press accidentally. That way I can end the annotation session from the iPad instead of having to use the keyboard or mouse.

3. Add a “undo stroke” command and shortcut. Users of AstroPad should then be able to map this to a two-finger tap, which would give a really nice undo workflow for drawing on screen. https://astropad.com/magic-gestures/. When annotating it's pretty common to want to undo a bad mark without having to clear everything you've drawn so far.

Slack has something similar during video calls where anyone can draw on the screen and the annotation automatically fades after a few seconds. Might be a good addition to your product.

It seems this is currently not possible. Would also be important to me.

Point noted.

Or you can simply use this https://github.com/sindresorhus/LaunchAtLogin

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.

Looking forward to it.

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.

edit: I tried it w/ Astropad.... works great

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/ ).

The different shapes are coming in the next release to Presentify so I am not considering it for the comparison now.