But if I was that kind of user who did demos monthly, the time saved on one or two videos that month is worth $30.

And these recording editors don’t have arrows and callouts, not even a freeze frame. I have to plan the recording to the letter and after 10 frustrating takes I just say fk it and try to polish the least confusing take

Maybe I should start contributing to openscreen to get the ideal recording editor people are looking for instead of paying and complaining.

I would be happy to pay $100 for unlimited access and be locked into the current version of the app, maybe only have minor version updates free so you don’t get locked into a buggy version.

But that’s a more complicated licensing model to implement I guess.

The recent video I did for Cling for example (https://lowtechguys.com/cling) I’ve had many people ask about how I did it because it has just the right amount of motion and highlighting. I did it in a few minutes of editing in the ScreenStudio UI.

I’m not saying it’s a great video, but people say it conveys the info well enough and that’s what matters. It would have taken me days to do the same with DaVinci Resolve because of my inexperience with complex editors.

A $30/month subscription is indeed too much, but I see it as a one time payment for that month when I release something, then I pause the subscription. I need it rarely, very few videos need zooming and motion.

Anyway I love to see alternatives like OpenScreen! What I would miss the most would be presets, not sure if it’s already there, but it’s a nice quality of life feature to have a consistent look to the motion effects between videos.

https://github.com/OneUptime/oneuptime/commit/538e40c4ae724e...

https://github.com/OneUptime/oneuptime/commit/2bc585df20e6bb...

You can fabricate a professional business image in a few days with AI now. It's going to be hard to build an honest brand when everyone is going to point and say "vibe coded slop" because of examples like this website.

I'm already seeing such comments whenever someone posts an app on /r/macapps and it's really discouraging for beginners. If I would have met that resistance and amount of mean comments when I launched Lunar, I would have probably never put in that amount of effort.

No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.

I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.

Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.

This could have been handled better.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607466

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

That was also my pain point with Lunar, working on a small balcony in a small apartment where the light from the window was constantly changing and the monitor always being way too bright or way too dim.

I broke one of those LG monitor joystick OSD buttons before I got to building Lunar.

Also some apps export Shortcut actions that can run in-app code: for example my Lunar app has an action that can help fixing arrangement when monitors flip around [1]

It's much easier to implement a struct for a Shortcut, than exporting AppleScript sdef files or creating IPC command-line tools, so a lot of apps take this route for code that needs access to the memory of the running app.

[1] https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#fix-monitor-arrangement

Jelly was a confusing experience for me, with JellyCuts becoming closed source and focusing on advertising, then Open-Jellycore branching out but not actually keeping up with the latest shortcut actions.

Cherri has almost every action you can find in the Shortcuts app, easy to use, and easy to create Shortcuts that can accept input and output so that they can be automated or scripted further.

I also wrote about how Claude was able to basically learn the language from scratch and write those fully compilable Shortcuts for me [1] because it was mind boggling to me that an LLM can do that. Curiously, this is becoming more and more normal in my mind.

[0] https://lowtechguys.com/crank

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/how-good-is-claude-really/#che...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47554340

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Those are valid problems affecting real people. For some are just missing conveniences, for others they are full on accessibility issues.

- Reference Presets no longer allow setting arbitrary SDR nits, making it impossible to natively unlock 1600nits of brightness on MacBook Pros or 2000nits on Studio Display XDR which breaks my Lunar app [0] (this seems to be intended, no idea what hurt Apple that they had to block this under SIP)

- The orange microphone dot indicator and its very colored friends can no longer have their brightness changed for dimming them, which made my YellowDot app useless [1] (I guess this is for privacy, I still think this could have a setting guarded under TouchID like Accessibility Permissions works)

- Floating non-titled windows don't accept mouse events (thankfully this got fixed) [2]

- Gamma table changes don't work on MacBook Neo and M5 Pro/Max which breaks Sub-zero Dimming and dimming external monitors that don't support DDC (thankfully, Apple is looking into it) [3]

- The resizing area thing on very rounded windows which drives everyone nuts, I had to add custom resize handlers to some of my windows

- The `com.apple.SwiftUI.Drag-` temporary file paths that get generated for any file that gets dragged from a drag&drop handler which makes it impossible to get to the original file when dragging images from Clop [4] or file shelf apps like Yoink, Dropover etc.

- NSImage returning different pixel count for .size than what the image actually has, breaking workflows that depended on that to determine the image DPI

[0] https://lunar.fyi/#xdr

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/YellowDot/issues/18

[2] https://developer.apple.com/forums//thread/814798

[3] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/819331

[4] https://lowtechguys.com/clop

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47267729

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47079644

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

For example, I like how we can swipe down to show the exposure slider, then swipe left/right to adjust exposure. Maybe it would make sense to have these hidden sliders on all 4 sides: right side could show a focus slider, left side could be white balance etc.

In any case, even without that, it's my most used new app of the year. Thanks for giving us such a simple way to get good looking color grading out of the iPhone!

[1] https://www.instagram.com/alin.panaitiu

It's a bit scary to see that the software we rely on every day is such a complex behemoth that even a seemingly small change can have so large repercussions.

The problem is that AI only helps add even more complexity since it's so simple to just add more code now that we don't have to write it.