screenfloat

ScreenFloat v2.1.1 is now available and comes with a bunch of cool new features and improvements. Read on to learn what’s changed.

What’s ScreenFloat?

ScreenFloat powers up your screenshots and -recordings in numerous ways.
First of all, it can make them float, like Picture-in-Picture; incredibly useful for keeping information always visible when you need to remember or reference something.
Next, it allows you to extract, view and redact information like text lines, faces and barcodes with a simple right-click.
Share and export quickly and easily with drag and drop.
Pick colors.
Crop, “fold”, rotate, resize, “de-retinize”, trim and mute your shots.
Annotate, markup and redact them.
Organize and collect them with its Shots Browser.
Synchronize your shots over iCloud.
And more – see my 8-part (and counting) blog post series “Get to know ScreenFloat 2” for an in-depth look.

What’s New in ScreenFloat v2.1(.1)
Highlight your Mouse Cursor and Keyboard Input in Screen Recordings

You can now highlight the position of your mouse cursor, cursor clicks and pressed keyboard keys in your video recordings, and customize the highlights’ appearance.

You can change the placement of the key stroke highlight, give highlights different colors and strengths and decide which modifier keys should be displayed, or if all keyboard input should be shown.1

I’ve also lowered the system requirements for these new highlights to macOS 12, so every user of ScreenFloat can make use of it!
Speaking of which, I’ve replaced ScreenFloat’s use of the screencapture CLI for video recordings with macOS’ ScreenCaptureKit APIs when running macOS 13 or newer.

Auto-Trim of Ending Video Recordings

ScreenFloat now auto-trims your video recordings so it does not include you ending the recording.
That means, when you go to the menu bar, click ScreenFloat’s icon and select Stop Recording, instead of that being part of the video, it gets trimmed away for you.
Consequently, when you highlight key strokes and use ScreenFloat’s keyboard shortcut to end the recording, that will get trimmed away for you, too.

Selective Audio Removal (All, System, Microphone)

When recording your screen with audio input and output, you can now not only remove all audio from the video later on, but decide if you’d like to remove only the system audio or the microphone audio you recorded.

This can also be set up as part of a double-click workflow for floating shots, of course:

Please note that this only works with captures recorded using ScreenFloat v2.1 – it adds app-specified metadata to the audio tracks to identify them, enabling this feature.

Save and Re-Use Often-Captured Screen Areas

If you find yourself capturing the same area of your screen repeatedly, ScreenFloat now allows you to save that capture area and use it any time you need it during re-capturing.

Aspect Ratios for Re-Capture

Just like when you crop shots in ScreenFloat, you can now set a fixed aspect ratio for your re-captures, making it easy to frame screenshots and recordings in 1:1, 3:2/2:3, 4:3/3:4, and 16:9/9:16 with a simple right-click.

Force-Sync Shots

Shots that would not normally sync because of a limit you have set up (like “only sync images / only sync videos”, or a file size limit), can now be forced to sync in the Shots Browser.

Repair your Database

In the rare case you have double-entries for “All Shots”, or “Trash”, for example, or if you’d like to restore unreferenced image- and video files, or sanitize tags and other metadata, you can launch ScreenFloat in Repair mode by holding down option (⌥) and shift (⇧) when launching it.

Links

ScreenFloat Website (+ free, 28-day trial)
Get to Know ScreenFloat 2 Blog Post Series
ScreenFloat 2 Usage Tips

ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store (one-time purchase)
Eternal Storms Software Productivity Bundle (includes ScreenFloat, Yoink for Mac and Transloader at ~25% off)

If you have any feedback or questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

  1. Keyboard input monitoring begins and ends with video recordings and does not operate at any other time when ScreenFloat is running. Key strokes are neither stored, nor logged, and certainly not transmitted. Input monitoring is exclusively used to display key presses in your video recordings. You can grant and revoke input monitoring permissions any time in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Input Monitoring. Please refer to my privacy policy for further info. ↩︎
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One of these days, I’d like to put some of the still-in-development ScreenFloat 2’s features through its paces (for instance, and most importantly, the migration of a ScreenFloat 1 library into the new format).

So I’m starting to put together a list of heavy-duty ScreenFloat users now, so that, once I’m ready, I can send out TestFlight invitations and get some feedback and insights right away.

If you consider yourself a heavy-duty ScreenFloat user, and/or have a large-ish library of shots and collections in ScreenFloat 1, please do reach out, I’d appreciate your help.

It’s still going to be a little while as I think about what I want to test exactly, and how, but I’ll be in touch nonetheless, you can be sure of that.

Thank you!

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Here’s an update on the state of my apps regarding macOS Big Sur and Macs with Apple Silicon.

In short: All my apps are ready for both, and the updates mentioned below will be released when macOS Big Sur is available at the latest (depending heavily on App Review and whether or not macOS Big Sur’s release is going to be the same, fun catastrophe of a surprise as iOS 14’s).

Let’s get into a little more detail.

Yoink for Mac (website | Mac App Store)

Yoink 128 2xFor Yoink – your file shelf that simplifies and improves drag and drop on your Mac –, all I had to do to make it fit nicely within Big Sur was to resolve some UI issues.
Recompiling for Apple Silicon went without further intervention on my part.

– Firstly, I updated the preferences window to the new style (which you can read more about here).
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– Secondly, macOS Big Sur introduces larger insets for most (if not all) of its scrollable views, so I’ve had to make Yoink’s window a little wider to make everything fit nicely again, while maintaining the new inset and selection look.
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– Last but not least, I asked Alex Käßner to update Yoink’s icon, and he certainly delivered (see above).

ScreenFloat (website | Mac App Store)

ScreenFloat for Mac App Icon

For ScreenFloat – which lets you create floating screenshots to keep almost anything visible in whatever app, space or window you are – my priority was to get it running natively on Apple Silicon and fix the most glaring UI issues on Big Sur (like the preferences window, again).
A bigger update is in the works, so my attention goes into that, but I wanted to make sure that – until the big update drops – it’ll run as efficiently and well as it can.

flickery (website | Mac App Store)

flickery for Mac App Icon

flickery – a full-featured client for flickr – will run natively on Apple Silicon and received, like ScreenFloat above and the apps below, a minor face-lift of its preferences window.
I’ve also had to remove QTKit (which I mostly did with a previous update of the app for macOS Catalina – but some more references I had kept around came up as an error in Xcode, so those had to go as well).
It was used to allow the user to edit videos before uploading them. It’s gone for the time being, but there are plenty of free tools (including QuickTime Player) that can step up here for the user in the meantime.

Transloader for Mac (website | Mac App Store | iOS App Store)

Transloader for Mac App Icon

Transloader – which lets you start downloads on your Mac remotely from your iOS device – also will receive a minor update. I had to remove some shadows from texts so it would look nicer in Dark Mode (and who does shadows nowadays anymore, anyways…).
I’ve also had to update its use of CloudKit, because some APIs were deprecated and replaced (in particular, I was using CKSubscription instead of the newer CKQuerySubscription). In the end, it was easy enough.
Transloader 3.0 is still in the works (some bits of progress you can read about here, here and here), so, like with ScreenFloat, I wanted to make sure it runs on macOS Big Sur (and natively on Apple Silicon) until the bigger update is available.

Glimpses (website | Mac App Store)

Glimpses for Mac App Icon

Glimpses – an app that lets you effortlessly create still motion videos – will receive a more substantial update.
After I fixed a glaring UI issue where the progress bar that Glimpses shows for the render progress was almost invisible, I gave the video creation algorithm an overhaul, which makes it up to 4x faster than before, which I’m really happy with. Multi-threading ftw! The app, too, will run natively on Apple Silicon.

SiriMote (free, website)

SiriMote for Mac App Icon

SiriMote didn’t require any UI fixes for Big Sur, but v1.3.9 which I recently released fixes a couple of connectivity issues – and already runs natively on Apple Silicon!
The app allows you to control your Mac and apps with your Apple TV Siri Remote.

I’m glad I was able to make all my apps ready for macOS Big Sur, and am very curious where things are going with Apple Silicon!

– Matthias
mail | website | twitter | instagram | facebook

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I’ve increased the trial times for Yoink for Mac and ScreenFloat for Mac from 15 days to 31 days.
These also apply if you’ve already used the demo version before.

Links

Yoink for Mac Website
Yoink for Mac (direct demo download)
Yoink on the Mac App Store
Yoink on Setapp

ScreenFloat for Mac Website
ScreenFloat for Mac (direct demo download)
ScreenFloat on the Mac App Store

Enjoy 🙂

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