What shipped, and when.
Every change to the Sowiks Mac app that you would actually notice, newest first. Written by the person who made it, which is why the commentary is not entirely flattering.
Most of these dates are Saturdays and Sundays. That is not a release strategy, it is a weekday job. More about who builds this.
Hide sensitive information in one press
- Press and hold on the screenshot for about half a second. Sowiks reads it and covers anything sensitive it finds.
- It looks for passwords, API keys, card numbers, bank accounts, email addresses and server names.
- Each cover is a normal annotation. Move it, resize it, or click it and press Delete. ⌘Z removes the whole set in one press.
- The check runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.
It will not find every secret. It will find the one you were about to paste into the wrong chat.
Pin a screenshot above your other windows
- Click the pin button at the bottom right of the editor. The screenshot stays on top of everything, including other apps and apps in full screen.
- It never takes focus, so you can read from it while you type somewhere else. Drag it anywhere you like.
- Hover over a pinned shot to copy or unpin it. The ••• button has Save, Upload & Copy Link, Copy Text and zoom.
- Pinned shots hide themselves while you take the next screenshot, so they never end up inside it. Unpin All in the menu bar clears them all.
A second monitor, but for one picture and about four minutes.
Paste into the editor, zoom with the trackpad
- Press ⌘V to paste an image onto the screenshot — one copied from another app, or a file copied in Finder. It lands as an extra picture you can move, resize and rotate.
- If the clipboard holds text instead, ⌘V adds it as a text annotation.
- Pinch on the trackpad to zoom in and out. ⌘0 fits the whole screenshot back on screen.
- Press Shift+Return inside a text annotation to start a new line. The box grows to fit.
Three things people assumed were already there. Which is a polite way to report a bug.
Fix a highlight, and a clipboard that keeps up
- A highlight that landed on the wrong line can now be fixed. Drag it where it belongs, resize it by its handles, or set its height with the width slider.
- Two spotlights no longer darken each other. They share one dim layer, so the bright areas stay bright.
- With Copy on Capture turned on, the clipboard now updates as you edit. Draw an arrow, paste, and the arrow is there. It stops as soon as you copy something of your own.
- Preferences has a new About tab: your version and macOS build (click to copy), the App Store page, and a support email that already has the version in the subject.
Two spotlights that did not overlap used to leave nothing bright at all. Nobody reported it, so I will call that low demand.
The background behind a screenshot grew up
- Film grain over any solid or gradient, from one switch that reads the same on a near-black fill as on a pale one.
- A frame around the shot — set the thickness, then keep it white or let it follow the gradient behind it.
- A 3×3 grid presses the screenshot against any edge or corner instead of parking it in the middle. Neither the frame nor the alignment changes the size of what you export.
- Five flat colours too close to tell apart gave way to Terracotta, Deep Emerald, Ink Navy, Clay Rose and Cobalt, with five gradients built from the same family.
Every one of these started life as “the screenshot looks a bit naked”. That sentence has now cost me a week.
The one you forgot to save is still there
- Sowiks keeps your last three screenshots for as long as it is running.
- Three bars under the corner preview switch between them.
- Copy, Save and Edit act on whichever one you picked.
The preview used to fade after a few seconds and take the shot with it. In hindsight, a strange thing to have been proud of.
Capture without disturbing what you are capturing
- The selection and the window picker appear over whatever you were doing and leave it focused — fullscreen apps stay fullscreen, and menus, popovers and media viewers stay on screen long enough to be captured.
- The area you are framing keeps its true colour. Only the screen around it darkens, so what you see while dragging is exactly what lands in the shot.
- Area, fixed-size, window, scrolling, OCR and screen recording all frame a capture the same way now.
Menus were the tell. Any tool that quietly steals focus cannot photograph an open menu — which is most of what anyone needs to document.
Shortcuts, already set
- Every capture and screen recording ships with a keyboard shortcut, so Sowiks works from the keyboard the moment it is installed.
- Anything you had bound yourself is left exactly as it was.
- Every default can be changed or cleared in Preferences → Shortcuts.
The old first run handed you a column of empty key fields and wished you luck.
Both of your monitors now count
- The selection overlay appears on every display, not just whichever one the pointer happened to be sitting on.
- Full-screen capture asks which screen you mean, and names them properly instead of guessing from their shape.
- The editor and the corner preview open on the screen where the shot was taken.
A two-monitor desk is not an exotic setup. Sowiks spent a while treating the second one like a rumour.
Seven days, and then it is actually yours
- Everything is unlocked for seven days, starting at your first capture. No card, no account, no email.
- The countdown sits in the menu bar, so you never have to go looking for how long is left.
- You can buy Solo without creating an account at all — the purchase belongs to the Mac until you decide otherwise.
Most trials end with a wall. This one ends with window capture and the entire editor still free, forever. My growth advisor would be furious, if I had one.
Clips get a backdrop, Preferences get a sub-editor
- Clips can be composited onto a background image at export — pick it in the Clip Editor and watch the preview update live.
- The menu bar ticks when an upload lands, so you know the link is ready without going to look.
- Preferences reshuffled: Recording has its own tab, and After Capture collapsed into one plain list of checkboxes.
“Save to disk” is now “Save automatically”, because enough people asked me where the disk was.
Screenshots that are not rectangles
- Hold C while selecting an area to take a circular screenshot.
- Hold Shift to lock the selection to a square.
- A new app icon, and an onboarding demo that plays itself instead of describing what it would look like.
Nobody asked for round screenshots. Everybody who tried them kept using them. I have stopped trying to predict this.
Sowiks Connect: straight into WordPress
- Pair a WordPress site once, then publish a screenshot into it from the editor with one button.
- Connected sites are listed in Preferences, where you can pause one or revoke it outright.
The old route was: save, hunt through Downloads, open the media library, upload, copy the URL, resolve to delete the leftover file, never delete the leftover file.
GIF recording, and somewhere to trim it
- Record straight to GIF — the same flow as video, with its own scale and frame-rate settings.
- The Clip Editor trims the start and the end, and holds the export settings for both video and GIF.
- A 3·2·1 countdown before recording begins.
The countdown exists entirely so the first frame is not your cursor lunging at the Record button. It is, quietly, the thing here I use most.
Smart extend background
- Pad a screenshot out to the shape you need with an edge-aware fill, instead of a stretched smear or a grey bar.
- It runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded to make it work.
The least glamorous thing on this page, and the one that has kept me out of Figma most often.
Draw on the video while it is still recording
- Arrows, shapes and a spotlight, drawn live into the recording rather than added afterwards.
- Blur privacy zones — a live frost over anything on screen you would rather not ship.
- The camera can be mirrored, for anyone unsettled by their own unmirrored face.
The blur zones exist because I once recorded a flawless four-minute demo with my inbox open for three of them.
Screen recording, camera and all
- Drag out a region, resize it before you start, and record it.
- A floating camera bubble you can drag anywhere inside the frame, and a mic meter that genuinely moves.
- Pause and resume mid-take — the segments stitch themselves back together on stop.
- Finished recordings upload on their own and hand you a share link.
“Can you just record a quick video of that” is how this got specified, by four different people, in one week.
One key per tool, and a colour picker
- P, M, A, S, T, C and B switch tools — matched to the physical key, so they still work on a Cyrillic layout.
- A colour picker with a live readout: hover a pixel, press Tab, the hex is on your clipboard.
- After Capture rules — decide once what happens to every screenshot: save it, copy it, open the editor, upload it.
The keyboard-layout fix took longer than the colour picker itself. I write in Ukrainian and kept pressing П expecting the pen.
Want the next one before you read about it?
Everything unlocked for seven days. No card, no account — and window capture with the full editor stays free after that.
Download for Mac