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Show HN: HUD-like live annotation and sketching app for macOS (draw.wrobele.com)

56 points by tomaszsobota ↗ HN
Hey all!

I'm happy to announce we've finally released our 2nd macOS app, Draw Over It, a tiny desktop app that enables drawing, highlighting, or annotating directly on top of anything on your Mac.

I've always wanted something like this for instant and unobtrusive sketching and annotation for pair programming and demos. I always found the standard web-based diagram and drawing tools a bit too cumbersome. So we built a simple overlay that could appear over any window or app with one shortcut.

It doesn't collect any user data and doesn't require any system permissions - it's sandboxed. It all stays on your device. You can export your annotations to a PNG with one click - or just take a screenshot if you need the background too.

It offers a slim but functional toolkit for every day tasks:

- Global hotkeys, hit a shortcut and start drawing over any app

- Multiple tools, pens, shapes, highlighters

- Per-screen canvases, each monitor gets its own space

- Focus mode, temporarily blur the background to emphasize what matters

- Low footprint, no subscriptions, no sign-ups, no data collected

- Localization, the app is translated to 14 languages

These two reasons make it different from other canvas apps, it's simple, lean and keeps your data on-device only.

It’s a one-time purchase ($2.99) on the Mac App Store.

I’d love feedback and suggestions for improvements!

10 comments

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TuringNYC
i'd love this for the iPad, i'd buy it right away but didnt see it for the iPad -- mostly because writing with a mouse is very difficult, but pens are easy
huydotnet
You can connect your iPad to mac via the charger cable and use it as an external monitor. Apple Pencil works too.
alsetmusic
The letters keep drawing after the mouse pointer stops moving. Is there such thing as an autocompleting typeface that recognizes handwriting from a Wacom tablet or something to explain this? If not, this demo doesn't seem authentic and that doesn't inspire confidence.
raju
I've been a VERY happy customer (no affiliation whatsoever) of Presentify for many years now, which was also a "Show HN" post (yeesh) 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22938604

I am very excited to try Draw Over It—thank you for sharing. I speak at several conferences a year, and also do online workshops and training, and Presentify has been a godsend.

However, the one limitation is if you toggle it, you lose your annotations. And you can't do anything with the underlying app—can't scroll or click buttons. Looking forward to trying this out.

K3UL
Is there any plan for a Windows version ? This is so useful
tomaszsobota
Thank you! Yes, a Windows release is coming! Perhaps not for at least a month but it's definitely on my roadmap :)
alyxya
I really like the homepage. It’s clear what the product does just after a few seconds and looks nice and smooth :)

I’m curious if the annotation handles things like scrolling within a webpage. That would be a really cool feature if annotations automatically moved with the scroll.

tomaszsobota
Thank you for the feedback! At the moment it's not scroll-aware, but it's an excellent idea, thank you.

I won't be able to make it app-aware, given the very rigid security posture (complete sandbox), but I may be able to make it scroll-aware, so at least within the same window it'd move relative to the 'global' position. I'll look into it :)

TaqPolymerase
Super useful and a great price. Added to my Login Items and remapped some of the extra modifier keys on my Keychron Q11 for even easier access to Draw/HUD. Perhaps one nice-to-have would be an indicator that 'Draw' is active so I know what my next click is going to do (maybe the menu icon changes?). Thank you!