Magpie 2.0: text off the screen, secrets off the screenshot

There is a particular kind of annoyance where the text you need is sitting right there on screen and there is no way to get at it. An error dialog that won't let you select its own message. A code sample in a video. A PDF viewer that fights you. Magpie 2.0 puts an end to it with Copy Text (⌥⇧O): drag over anything on screen, and it's on your clipboard.

Recognition runs entirely on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is sent to a service, and it works with the network off. The text comes back laid out the way it looked, so wrapped lines stay together, paragraphs keep the blank line between them, and columns that sit side by side on screen come out side by side instead of running into each other. If you'd rather have flowing paragraphs for pasting into a document, Settings ▸ Capture ▸ Copy Text will join the wrapped lines instead.

Every grab collects in Capture History, in its own Text segment beside Images, Recordings and Colors, searchable by what the text says. "That error with the port number in it" is findable weeks later. Any capture you already have can be read the same way with the text button on a thumbnail or a History card, and the annotation editor has its own text tool for when only one line of a screenshot is worth having.

Auto-Redact

The other half of reading a screenshot is deciding what nobody else should see. The shield in the annotation editor (⇧⌘R) reads the capture and covers the email addresses, card numbers, keys, tokens, passwords and phone numbers it finds, before you send it to anyone.

It runs on your Mac, it lands as a single ⌘Z, and it tells you exactly what it covered, so disagreeing with it takes one keystroke. Card numbers are checksum-verified so order numbers and timestamps aren't mistaken for them, and git SHAs, UUIDs and SCREAMING_CONSTANTS are left alone. IP addresses are off by default, because a developer's screen is full of them.

Trim, pin, and a cleaner desktop

Recordings can be trimmed now. The scissors on a recording's card opens a window with the video and a filmstrip under it: drag the two handles to set what to keep, Space plays and pauses, I and O set the handles at the playhead, the arrows step a frame, Return cuts. Playback stays inside the kept range, so what you hear is what you'll get. The trimmed version replaces the original in History and the original goes to the Trash, so a cut that took too much is recoverable. Animated GIF, PNG and WebP exports trim too, frame by frame, without going back to the recording they came from.

Pin to Screen (⌥⇧P) floats a capture above everything else until you close it. Retype from it, compare against it, keep a reference in view while you work somewhere else. A pin never takes focus, it follows you across spaces and over full-screen apps, and it stays out of your own screenshots, recordings and screen shares. Click-through turns one into something you can work straight through, for tracing or comparing.

Two smaller ones worth having. Highlight clicks in recordings draws a ripple where you click, into the recording only, so your screen is untouched while you work and window recordings get it as well. And hide desktop icons gives you captures with your wallpaper and none of the clutter on it, without touching your actual desktop: nothing vanishes from under you, Finder is not restarted, and there is nothing to put back afterwards.

Scrolling capture, rebuilt

Scrolling capture worked well on ordinary pages and gave up on interesting ones. getgrav.org turned out to break it in about five different ways at once, and fixing that properly took most of this release.

Sticky headers and footers are now recognized as they really are on real pages, rather than as rows that happen to be pixel-identical between frames. A translucent bar has content ghosting through it, a header that starts transparent reads as nothing at all against the first frame, and a bar that animates over itself is never still. A detected header appears once at the top and a detected footer is stitched on once at the end, instead of being repeated at every join. Seams are judged by how many rows line up and by how far that beats the next-best alignment, with the shift the scroll was aimed at always evaluated and counted as corroboration, which is exactly what a page made of identical repeating cards needs to break a tie.

Sections that pin while they animate are recognized as "didn't move" rather than "the capture is broken", so scroll-jacked marketing pages get walked through instead of ending the capture early. A banner that slides in a few seconds after load no longer poisons every seam after it. A seam that can't be trusted is re-shot from the same place rather than scrolled past, which used to put it permanently out of reach. And when a capture does stop early, it keeps the frames it already had and says why on the thumbnail ("Nothing scrolled", "Stitching became unreliable") instead of handing back a short image that looks like a whole page.

The paid features have a name now: Settings ▸ License reads Magpie Pro, and the trial says how much of it is left. Magpie is still $9.99 one time for 3 Macs, with a 14-day full trial, and screenshots, the color picker and the everyday tools stay free forever after that. Grab it from the Magpie page or with Homebrew: brew install --cask skulkworks/tap/magpie. Full details are in the changelog.