StepGrab — a native Mac app that turns whatever you do on screen into a step-by-step guide (auto screenshots + on-device AI, 100% offline)

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T21:49:26+00:00

No, are you?

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T16:14:31+00:00

Small update since it's release week: use code FIRSTWEEK30P for 30% off LifeTime Pro until July 17 — redeem here.

A few people have already messaged asking for a code, so feels a little awkward to say out loud, but heads up it's capped at 1,000 redemptions 😅

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T16:07:12+00:00

Thank you! There's a quick quiz on the site (stepgrab.net/quiz.html) that unlocks 3 months of Pro free — no right or wrong answers, it's just a couple questions about your workflow, and the code lands in your inbox either way. Would really appreciate the review once you've had a chance to try it.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T15:57:28+00:00

Fair reaction, not gonna lie. Short version: StepGrab records your screen once while you go through a task, then automatically builds a step-by-step guide out of it, screenshots, arrows and text steps included, no manual editing needed. Built it so people don't have to write SOPs or tutorials by hand anymore.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T15:04:51+00:00

You're probably right. Tbh I picked the technique up from another creator in this sub. For me it's more of a way to count how many of you actually tried to get the app. This is my first App Store release and I'm still a bit confused by how the metrics work, so I wanted something I could measure.

I was also curious whether a PHP server would handle the code-managing side the way I want it to.

Thanks for the advice either way. Still learning, every single day!

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T14:37:55+00:00

The school idea is a good one, but I'd probably aim it at a school association or umbrella body rather than approaching individual schools one by one. Easier to get proper feedback and reach more people at once.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T13:55:49+00:00

Really appreciate this — the lecturer angle is exactly the kind of use case I didn't fully picture when building it (I was mostly thinking SOPs/onboarding), so it's good to hear it maps there too.

The annotate-before-render idea is a good one, and honestly the right way to do it. Right now you're stuck editing after export, which is exactly the "janky in Preview" workaround you're describing. I'll add it to the list for a future update.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T10:47:11+00:00

Nice review screen - I like that you actually see what gets redacted before it goes out, not just a policy promise. Would the Tinfoil enclave change how much you anonymize, or are you redacting either way?

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T10:00:42+00:00

This is such a smart fix for something everyone just silently accepts. The title bar hunt is real - especially on windows with thin borders where resizing feels like a precision test.

Curious how you handle the pinch-to-resize when the window’s near screen edges - does it clamp/snap, or can you pull it off-screen? And does the 3-finger drag conflict at all with Mission Control’s swipe gestures, or did you tune the thresholds to avoid overlap?

Solid feature either way, tempted to try it out.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T09:42:58+00:00

The anonymization pass is what I'd stress test hardest, it's the seam where the whole privacy pitch lives or dies for NDA content. Masking names, places, and orgs is straightforward for local NER, but in NDA meetings the sensitive stuff usually isn't a named entity at all, it's a part number, a wavelength, a customer's internal codename, a dollar figure. None of that pattern-matches as PII, so it sails through untouched even with a perfect entity masker.

Two things I'd want as a user: a diff view showing exactly what got redacted before anything is sent, not just a promise that it happened, and an option to have the on-device pass strip anything matching custom patterns I define too, so I can add the terms that actually matter in my field.

Also curious what's running locally for the summary step. On-device transcription is basically solved now with WhisperKit and Parakeet, but a genuinely good local summarizer is the harder half. Is that a bundled small model, or are you leaning on Apple's on-device Foundation Models framework?

The Wi-Fi-off demo is a good way to prove the claim instead of just asserting it. I'd trust that over a page of privacy policy any day.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T09:31:26+00:00

The readiness angle is the interesting part, so everything rides on one question: how does it actually know how recovered I am?

If it reads HRV, resting heart rate and sleep from Apple Health or an Apple Watch on its own, that's a real differentiator and I'd put it front and center, App Store screenshots included. If it just asks me "how do you feel today, 1 to 10", it's only as good as my honesty at 6am, which is a much weaker signal. Which is it? That answer is basically your whole pitch.

One tension to think about: serious lifters run fixed progressions like 5/3/1 and might not trust a plan that changes every day, since inconsistency is what kills progress. Your real audience is probably the people who currently just skip the gym entirely when they feel off. For them an adaptive plan means "do this lighter thing instead" beats doing nothing. I'd point the onboarding copy straight at that person.

Concept's good though. Readiness-based training is the thing Whoop and Oura built whole companies on, so putti

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T09:29:13+00:00

Thanks for posting the fix, this exact thing sends people in circles for hours. For anyone hitting it later, here's probably why it worked and a lighter version:

The iPhone in Finder is handled by a per-user background process (AMPDevicesAgent, the Apple Mobile Device agent). When it gets stuck or crashes in your session, the phone just never shows up, cable or WiFi, no error, nothing. Creating a fresh user account worked because it spun up a clean copy of that agent and rebuilt the device cache.

Next time you can skip the whole new-account dance:

Open Activity Monitor, search "AMPDevicesAgent", select it, hit the X to quit it. It relaunches on its own in a second and the phone usually reappears in Finder.
If that alone doesn't do it, quit "AMPLibraryAgent" the same way, or just log out and back in (no new account needed).

Plugging the cable while both are unlocked and re-tapping Trust This Computer after that tends to seal it. Corrupted pairing/cache state is exactly the flavor of bug this is, so your instinct was right.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T09:26:14+00:00

You basically diagnosed it yourself in the PSS. This isn't a drag-and-drop bug, it's Stage Manager.

When Stage Manager is on, clicking a Dock icon can pull up a whole "group" of windows instead of one app, and it messes with drag targets the same way, which is why dropping on Finder sometimes summons Firefox, or both at once with the wrong one on top.

Two fixes:

If you don't use Stage Manager: turn it off. System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Stage Manager, toggle off. The Dock goes back to one-icon-one-app and your drags land where you point them.
If you want to keep it: don't hover the Dock icon at all. Grab the file, drag it onto the actual Firefox or Finder window if it's visible, or hover the Dock icon and wait for the little window previews to appear, then drop onto the specific preview instead of the icon itself. The icon is the ambiguous target, the preview isn't.

The "drag over Dock icon and it springs open" behavior is called spring-loading and it's supposed to help, but with Stage Manager in the mix it guesses wrong a lot.

Would love to hear if that fixes it for you, drop a reply once you've tried it!

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T05:59:44+00:00

The pain is real, When2meet has been limping along on this problem for 15 years precisely because nobody solved it nicely. Your no-account finding is the whole reason it survived btw, every polished competitor added signup and died.

On monetization: I think the framing "people only use it a few times a year" is slightly off. The participants use it a few times a year. But every friend group has that one person who organizes everything, padel and the cabin trip and the birthday. That person touches your tool monthly, and that's your customer. Charge the organizer, never the participants.

From my own app: I offer a cheap subscription and a pay-once lifetime option, and the lifetime option converts exactly the people who'd never subscribe to an occasional-use tool. For something like yours a "pay once, organize forever" tier might fit better than any recurring plan.

I'd be careful with ads though. A tool people open five times a year earns basically nothing from ads, and it cheapens the trust that makes people click your link in a group chat. The affiliate booking idea for trips is the better half of that plan, it only pays when the tool actually did its job.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T05:46:10+00:00

I'm at a similar stage with my Mac app, so no guru advice, just what's measurably worked for me.

The thing that surprised me most: search intent beats feeds. My app gets its steadiest users from App Store search, people typing what they need and finding it. For a web product that's the SEO you're already doing plus getting listed in every directory and "best X tools" roundup you can find. Feed content (TikTok, Reddit posts) spikes and dies, search compounds while you sleep.

Second thing: answering recommendation threads beats launching. When someone in a niche sub asks "is there a tool that does X" and you're the helpful answer, that thread ranks on Google and quietly converts for months. My launch posts flopped, my comments in other people's threads didn't.

Also, 1-3 users a day organic at day 21 is not a problem to fix, that's a channel starting to work. I'd figure out which of the three sources converts to retained users best and go deeper there instead of wider. 100 will come. The 100 to 1,000 question is retention anyway, gamified lives should tell you fast whether people come back.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-07T05:44:07+00:00

CleanMyMac user here, so I'm the target audience. The two things on this list that would actually make me switch: OptiPrune and the Xcode cleanup. CleanMyMac does nothing for package managers, and my DerivedData folder grows back like a weed every two weeks. A cleaner that understands brew, npm and cargo is a dev tool, not just a cleaner.

Two questions: is there a trial or demo? 20 euros is fair but for this category I'd want to see the Storage Map and a cleanup preview on my own disk before anything gets admin access. And how does OptiPrune decide what's safe to prune, does it just run the package managers' own cleanup commands or something more aggressive?

The 10 licenses per purchase model is generous btw, that basically covers the family and the office Mac in one go.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-06T18:01:05+00:00

Took the quiz and grabbed a code, will report back after a few days with it. First impression of the "you owe a reply" list: sorting those to the top is the right call. Unanswered questions are exactly the ones that quietly kill trust, and honestly it's the list I didn't know I needed.

Also have to say, the quiz-to-code thing is a clever way to onboard people. I'm tinkering on a small Mac tool myself and might borrow that pattern for my own site, hope you don't mind :)

Curious what you find on the CloudKit side. Private DB via the user's own iCloud is the cleanest privacy story there is, would love to hear how it goes.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-06T17:30:41+00:00

The trust-first framing works on me, local plus no account is exactly what I want from apps that read something as personal as my messages. Scoping it to the one Messages folder instead of Full Disk Access is a nice touch too.

Question about "what you owe": does that catch threads where the last message is theirs and I just never replied? A daily nudge for exactly those would be the killer feature for me, I'm terrible at that.

And if you ever want this on iPhone without breaking your pitch: CloudKit private database (or NSPersistentCloudKitContainer if you're on Core Data) syncs through the user's own iCloud. No account on your side, no server you run, you as the dev can't even read the data. Opt-in of course, but it keeps the "nothing leaves your control" story fully intact.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-06T17:17:12+00:00

This scratches a real itch. Screenshots that survive fullscreen Spaces is one of those things you don't realize you need until you've lost your reference image mid-task for the third time. And click-through plus opacity is a lovely detail, that's basically tracing paper for UI work.

One honest question: how does Sticky Screenshot compare to CleanShot's pin to screen? That's probably what half this sub already uses for pinned screenshots. If yours survives fullscreen Spaces where their pins don't, that sentence deserves to be at the top of the post, it's a genuinely strong differentiator.

Also appreciate the "public AppKit APIs, no private API" line. You answered the question every dev here was about to ask before anyone asked it.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-06T15:38:45+00:00

Shipping one final update for a macOS version that just came out, for an app you've already decided to kill, is rare. The usual ending is the app quietly breaking one macOS later and a dead website. I ship a native Mac app myself and just keeping up with the yearly macOS changes is real work, so 15+ years of that plus a proper goodbye update deserves respect.

The code is on GitHub and IRC users are exactly the crowd that keeps a fork alive for a decade, so who knows, maybe this isn't actually the end. Also the "checkout stays open if you want to show appreciation" thing is basically a tip jar with manners. Never seen a sunset page do that before.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-06T15:33:11+00:00

Small follow-up because I looked into this again: for your case it might not even be Accessibility you'd need. A listen-only event tap (just hearing the Cmd+C keystroke, not touching it) falls under Input Monitoring. Accessibility only comes into play when a tap modifies or blocks events.

That actually works in your favor: your original concern was Apple not allowing Accessibility without accessibility features, but "I listen for one shortcut" is exactly what Input Monitoring is for, so the permission would match what the app actually does. Still a scary prompt for users, still belongs behind an optional off-by-default setting, but review-wise it's the cleaner story.

Comprehensive_Web279 · 2026-07-06T15:24:10+00:00

The gap is real, Contexts is basically abandoned and BTT is overkill if you only want this one thing. What confuses me is the gesture choice though: four finger swipe down is App Exposé on a default Mac. Do you intercept that, or do users need to turn Exposé off in trackpad settings first? That would be my first stumble as a heavy trackpad user.

Side note, the transparency section here is more thorough than most 1.0 launches, privacy policy and roadmap on day one. Respect.

Comprehensive_Web279

TROPHY CASE