A free app for Mac
Pane
A screen recorder for how-to videos that never leaves your Mac.
Pane records your screen with your camera in a corner, then adds pointer highlights, click sounds, zoom and captions at export, so you can change them after you record. Everything runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.
- macOS 15 or later (captions need macos 26)
- Apple silicon and Intel
- Free and open source
- Signed and notarized by Apple
Version 1.0.0
Why I built it
It started with something I needed.
I make a lot of short how-to videos for the people who use CoachTide. I wanted something like Loom, one that keeps private details private. A screen recording can show more than you meant to: a name, an email, a tab you forgot to close.
So I built a recorder that keeps all of it on my Mac. Nothing goes to a server, and the polish is added after I record, so a slip of the mouse is something I fix in a click instead of a reason to start over.
What it does
What Pane does
- Your screen, with you in the corner
- Record a whole display or one window. Your camera sits in a corner circle, with a blurred, solid or custom background done on your Mac.
- Polish you can change later
- Pointer highlights, click rings, click sounds and zoom toward clicks are added when you export, not burned in while you record. Change your mind and export again.
- Keyboard shortcuts on screen
- Shortcuts you press show as a small badge, so viewers can follow along. Ordinary typing is never logged.
- Captions from your own voice
- Turn your narration into captions on your Mac, then save them as a file, burn them into the video, or send them to Final Cut Pro.
- Trim and hand off
- Trim the start and end in the review window, export an edited copy, or send the screen and camera to Final Cut Pro as separate layers.
- Leaves the private stuff out
- Choose apps that are never recorded, keep notification banners out, and let Pane find and blur emails, phone numbers, passwords and keys before you share.
Coming in 1.1
- A teleprompter that follows your voice as you read.
- Automatic removal of the sentences you say again, so your retakes cut themselves out.
Private by design
It stays on your Mac.
- Pane does its work on your Mac. No accounts, no analytics, no tracking.
- Recording, reading text on screen, blurring and captions all use Apple’s on-device frameworks. Your recordings are never uploaded.
- Recordings are saved to the Movies folder on your Mac.
- The only time it goes online is a once-a-day check for updates, and every update is signed so it can’t be forged.
Permissions, asked only when a feature first needs them
- Screen recording, camera and microphone, the first time you record.
- Speech recognition, only when you make captions.
- Input Monitoring, only when you turn on keyboard shortcut badges.
How it's built
For the technical reader.
Written in Swift on ScreenCaptureKit for capture, Vision for person detection and reading on-screen text, Speech for captions, and AVFoundation for writing and exporting video.
Every release is signed with my Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and runs with the hardened runtime, so other software can’t slip code into it. Updates come through Sparkle, and each update is signed with the app’s own EdDSA key and checked against it before anything is unpacked.
- ScreenCaptureKit
- Vision
- Speech
- AVFoundation
The full code is on GitHub, MIT licensed.
Ready to try Pane?