HUD-like live annotation and sketching app for macOS
Details
- External ID
- 45747402
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- HUD-like live annotation and sketching app for macOS
- Website domain
- wrobele.com
- Launched
- Oct. 29, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 56
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8773584905660378
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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 languagesThese 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!
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS and desktop customization tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- live annotation and sketching tool for macos
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes A macOS transparent overlay HUD app with drawing tools can be built quickly using Swift, SwiftUI/AppKit, and standard Canvas/CoreGraphics drawing APIs.
Discussion
19 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Presentify
Concerns raised: Demo cursor drawing appears inauthentic/unfiltered, Product presentation comes off as sketchy without clarification, Can't interact with underlying app while drawing (scroll, click buttons)
Feature requests: Visual indicator when Draw mode is active, Scroll-aware annotations that move with webpage scrolling, Windows version, iPad version with stylus support, Control center toggle and keyboard shortcuts for on/off/toggle
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 185 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #46 of 186 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Looks like the first mover among its competitors.
- Glassboard · hn · 2026-06-18 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- A fast, offline Markdown viewer for macOS built in Swift · hn · 2026-09-22 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Fun sketch · hn · 2025-12-26 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation · hn · 2026-06-14 · 250 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- ZenPaint, a pixel-perfect MacPaint recreation for the browser · hn · 2025-11-25 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- ZenPaint, a pixel-perfect MacPaint recreation for the browser · hn · 2025-11-15 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Snowfairy AI OS Pen · ph · 2026-09-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Foldout Capture Studio · ph · 2026-09-26 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.