Bug reports & support
Circle the broken thing, point an arrow at it, pin a note on it. A shot that explains itself, ready to paste into the ticket or the reply.
HotShot
Capture it, mark it up, share it.
Shoot the screen, a window, a dragged-out region, a live web page or a recording — then mark it up, dress it up and export it. One menu-bar app for the whole trip.
Or pick it up in a bundle with over twenty other apps.
Docs & tutorials
Numbered callouts walk a reader through the steps, and a frozen screen catches the menu or tooltip the step is about.
Listings, slides & posts
Frame the shot on a color, a gradient or your own picture, with a title, padding, rounded corners and a shadow. Export, copy, or share a link.
Quick demo clips
Record the screen or one window, trim it on a filmstrip, cut out the dead air, zoom in where it matters, and export the clip dressed like your screenshots.
Six ways to shoot.
Screen, window, a dragged-out selection, a live web page — or record the screen or a single window. Click the menu-bar icon, or summon the panel from anywhere with a global shortcut and press ⌘1–⌘6.
Stage it first: sweep the desktop icons away, hide the menu bar and the Dock, resize the target window to an exact size, or set a 3, 5 or 10-second delay. Everything goes back the way it was the moment the shot is taken.
Mark it up.
Rectangles, ellipses, arrows, lines, numbered callouts, crosses, pointers, text and sticky notes with leader arrows — each a key away. Snapping guides line things up, ⌥-drag leaves a copy, and annotations copy between documents as real, editable objects.
A pixel loupe magnifies what’s under the crosshair down to the pixel grid, a precise crop editor nudges an edge one pixel at a time, and everything undoes, all the way back.
Make it presentable.
Flip to the Compose tab and set the marked-up shot on a real backdrop — a color, a gradient, your own picture, or nothing at all — with a title and caption, padding, rounded corners and a shadow or glow. Autofill writes the title from the app and window you shot.
Export a PNG, copy it, drag it out, or publish it to your own iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive and get a link on the clipboard.
Recordings, refined.
Crop the footage to the part that matters, trim it on a filmstrip, cut stretches out of the middle, and lay zoom spans that follow the pointer. HotShot can draw a stylish synthetic cursor with a comet trail in place of the real one.
Add a camera bubble, your microphone and the Mac’s own sound — together, so you can talk over whatever’s playing. The same backdrop, padding, corners and shadow apply to the video, and a transparent backdrop exports with a real alpha channel.
Shoot the page you’re on.
Browse to a page inside HotShot and shoot it full length at as many widths as you like — phone, tablet, laptop, desktop — in one run, laid out side by side in a single document. The address bar remembers where you’ve been, and the folder button opens an .html file from your own Mac, stylesheets and images intact.
Or capture the page in your real browser: the Safari and Chrome extensions hand it over logged in, scrolled where you left it, cookie banner already dismissed. (Safari only in the App Store build.)
Catch the hover
Turn on freezing and HotShot takes the shot the instant you press its shortcut, so menus, tooltips and hover states are still in it. The pointer comes back as a layer you can move, restyle or delete.
✓ https://…/HotShot-shot.png
A link, from your own storage
Publish a shot or a clip to iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive and get a link on the clipboard. The file lands in your account — HotShot hosts nothing.
A clean desktop, every time
Desktop icons, the menu bar and the Dock step out of the shot and come straight back afterwards. (The App Store build can hide desktop icons, but not the menu bar or Dock.)
Save
A pixel loupe
The Crosshair tool brings up a magnifier that follows the pointer, snapped to the shot’s own pixels, with a pixel grid at 3× and up — for checking a hairline, an edge, or exact alignment.
Pricing.hotshot
- Annotations
- Trim & cuts
- Zooms
- Every setting
Come back to it later
Save a capture or a recording session and reopen it to keep working: every annotation, trim, cut, zoom and setting, exactly as you left them. Or open a video you already have.
# E0357FGradient
Colors your way
One color picker for strokes, text and backdrops, with a saturation pad, a hue strip, curated palettes and a hex field — plus a Gradient switch for backdrops.
Get HotShot
On the App Store, or as a notarized direct download with a free trial that auto-updates via Sparkle. Buying more than one app? HotShot is included in my bundles, along with over twenty other apps.
Which one? The same app either way, with three exceptions: the App Store build can’t resize a window before shooting it, can’t hide the menu bar or Dock, and can’t use the Chrome extension.
Requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later, and Screen Recording permission.