Magpie 1.0: capture, record, annotate

Magpie 1.0 is out. It's a screen capture tool for the Mac, and the short version is that it does the whole job in one app: take the shot, mark it up, and get it to wherever it's going.

Captures cover area, window, fullscreen, scrolling and timed, all on global hotkeys. Scrolling capture stitches a long page into a single image, which is the one everybody asks for and nobody's built-in tool does. Recording covers an area, a window or the full screen to MP4, and there's a Record as GIF option for when a video is more file than the thing deserves.

The export engine handles GIF, APNG and animated WebP for recordings, plus WebP and AVIF for stills with opt-in optimization. A twelve-second demo that's 8 MB as an MP4 is a very different thing to attach to a bug report than one that's 400 KB.

The annotation editor has a live info cluster that reads the color under your cursor, the image size and the current zoom while you work. Finished captures land in a quick-access thumbnail stack you can drag straight out of into Slack or a mail window, and everything is kept in a capture history browser so the shot you took twenty minutes ago is still there.

Uploads go to your own storage, S3-compatible or SFTP, and hand back a share link. There's no Magpie account in the middle of that and nothing of yours passes through a server I run.

First launch walks you through the permissions macOS requires for any of this to work, because a screen capture tool that silently records nothing is a bad first five minutes.

Magpie is $9.99 one time for 3 Macs. There's a 14-day full-feature trial, and screenshots stay free forever after it ends, so the everyday case never expires. Grab it from the Magpie page or with Homebrew: brew install --cask skulkworks/tap/magpie. Full details are in the changelog.