I’m a freelance consultant, I often need to use screensharing to get my point across, either explaining, teaching or convincing. To help me make my life easier, I have build 2 Mac apps that help me with my screensharing life. I think some of you might find these helpful. Both are completely free apps.
Glassboard lets you draw over anything on me Mac, across every app and every screen, Khan-academy style!
Hold a keybind and draw. Release and it fades away. That’s all. Except colors, shapes, a radial menu switcher and keybinds galore. But the basic concept is simple hold, draw, release, continue presenting without losing flow.
Viewport lets you select a custom area on your screen that gets mirrored to a hidden virtual screen which you can select in Zoom, Google Meet, Teams & co for sharing. It’s made for widescreen and XL monitors where sharing the whole screen is anti-social and when sharing just a single window is just not enough.
Viewport is still an early release and I’m looking for friendly beta testers to get feedback about how it works with different screen setups.
I would be interested in comparisons of Glassboard to EpicPen. Specifically, consider working with an iPad as the base video-casting screen connected via Screen Mirroring to a mac. The EpicPen toolbar can be positioned on the iPad and annotations can be drawn on the iPad using the Apple Pencil. Does Glassboard allow for such an operational mode?
Also, can Viewport allow one to select a wired/wireless(BT) connected iPad as its virtual screen? Would such a use-case be of interest, e.g. potentially as an option to bypass direct Screen Sharing?
These look good. I’ll give these a try and share any feedback.
Here’s a thought: I’ve not seen any drawing app do this and it makes sense why–when sharing a window with any app, nothing can also allow annotations since the app only sees the selected window. How about a mode in which both these apps work in tandem such that Viewport picks a window instead of an area + the Glassdoor annotations? This virtual screen can then be passed off to any screen sharing app. This will protect any accidental sharing since only one user-picked window will be shared, just with an invisible annotation layer.
A main difference is that Glassboard’s design goal was not to require any UI for changing colors on the screen. Glassboard is designed for use when presenting and screensharing and I didn’t want any additional UI to distract from the content (and the user’s drawings).
The only exception is the radial menu but it’s entirely optional and meant to only be visible briefly.
EpicPen, like other existing tools all put drawing controls to be permanently on the screen.
I think Viewport already does 90% of what you are suggesting. You can select an area to for the mirrored viewport and then maximize any window to fill the viewpoint.
But the idea to “snap” the viewport to a single existing window dimension is a nice one and should be reasonably easy to implement. Thanks for the suggestion!
I might add, a significant difference also is that Glassboard is for marking temporary annotations that automatically disappear, whereas EpicPen (and perhaps others) allow that annotations are to remain visible until they are manually erased.
The permanent presence of drawing controls is a consequence of this difference especially.
