First off — thanks for Screenshot Studio. The zero-signup, no-watermark browser editor is genuinely great, and the animation/video export work is impressive.
This is a question about how it relates to better-shot, the macOS app, from someone who uses both.
The two products solve different halves of the problem
Screenshot Studio is an excellent editor, but the image still has to get there — pasted or dragged in after the OS took it. The capture half is exactly what a browser cannot do:
- a global hotkey that fires while another app is focused;
- region and window capture without a system picker dialog every single time;
- OCR straight from a selection to the clipboard;
- pinned floating screenshots on top of everything;
- screen recording without a permanent "this tab is sharing your screen" indicator.
getDisplayMedia cannot replace any of that. So for those of us who capture dozens of times a day, better-shot isn't an inferior version of Screenshot Studio — it's the part of the workflow the web version structurally can't reach. The two complement each other rather than compete.
The ask
better-shot hasn't had a commit since 7 June, while it has 2.1k stars and 16 open PRs, some waiting since 8–10 June — including community fixes for real problems (auto-updater installing an unverified .app in #70, per-display recording selection in #67, Swift 6 build errors in #80).
I'm not asking you to split your attention evenly — Screenshot Studio is clearly where the momentum is, and that's a fair call. But it would be a shame to let the macOS app quietly rot. Even a low-effort path would help a lot:
- merging the small, self-contained community fixes, or
- adding a co-maintainer with merge rights for the Swift side, or
- simply saying in the README where the project stands, so contributors know whether to invest.
I've just sent four small patches there myself (memory leaks and main-thread work in the capture path: KartikLabhshetwar/better-shot#90, #91, #92, #93) plus a few issues describing what I found while reading the code. Happy to keep helping if there's a path for changes to land.
Either way — thanks for building both.
First off — thanks for Screenshot Studio. The zero-signup, no-watermark browser editor is genuinely great, and the animation/video export work is impressive.
This is a question about how it relates to better-shot, the macOS app, from someone who uses both.
The two products solve different halves of the problem
Screenshot Studio is an excellent editor, but the image still has to get there — pasted or dragged in after the OS took it. The capture half is exactly what a browser cannot do:
getDisplayMediacannot replace any of that. So for those of us who capture dozens of times a day, better-shot isn't an inferior version of Screenshot Studio — it's the part of the workflow the web version structurally can't reach. The two complement each other rather than compete.The ask
better-shot hasn't had a commit since 7 June, while it has 2.1k stars and 16 open PRs, some waiting since 8–10 June — including community fixes for real problems (auto-updater installing an unverified
.appin #70, per-display recording selection in #67, Swift 6 build errors in #80).I'm not asking you to split your attention evenly — Screenshot Studio is clearly where the momentum is, and that's a fair call. But it would be a shame to let the macOS app quietly rot. Even a low-effort path would help a lot:
I've just sent four small patches there myself (memory leaks and main-thread work in the capture path: KartikLabhshetwar/better-shot#90, #91, #92, #93) plus a few issues describing what I found while reading the code. Happy to keep helping if there's a path for changes to land.
Either way — thanks for building both.