Import video from file — you can now import an existing video (MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI, MKV, M4V) as a new project directly from the sidebar "+" menu or the system tray. The imported clip lands in the timeline ready to edit, with its embedded audio preserved.
Redesigned support modal — the Ko-fi milestone modal now shows a desk-scene illustration, a cleaner layout, and a full-width call-to-action button.
Auto zoom and marker layer restored — Fixed a regression where auto zoom was not applied to new recordings and the timeline click markers were missing. The toolbar window was expanded to full-screen in a previous release, but its bounds were still being used to filter cursor events — silently dropping every click and scroll recorded during a session. Cursor tracking now works correctly again.
Processing state restored — The canvas now correctly clears while a new recording is being processed, showing the loading indicator before the new recording loads.
Auto zoom restored — Fixed a regression where auto zoom was not being applied to new recordings. The rendering pipeline is no longer torn down between recordings, so detected zoom clips are correctly applied on load.
Menu bar icon fixed in packaged builds — The Screenforge menu bar icon now loads correctly from the app bundle in production. Previously it could fail to appear after installation.
Menu bar icon color corrected — The fallback menu bar dot icon now renders in the correct brand color instead of an inverted blue.
Area recording — You can now record a custom region of your screen. Click the crop icon in the floating toolbar to draw a selection, then start recording. A dark overlay dims everything outside your chosen area during countdown and recording.
Draggable toolbar — The floating recording toolbar can now be repositioned anywhere on screen by dragging the grip handle at the top.
Style presets — Save your current look (background, cursor, camera, keyboard, captions) as a named preset and apply it to future recordings in one click from the top bar.
Menu bar icon — Screenforge now lives in the macOS menu bar. Quickly start a new recording, open the app, or stop an active recording — with a live timer — without switching windows.
Camera preview window — The camera feed now appears in a separate floating window that stays on top of all apps while recording.
Privacy masks — Hide sensitive content in your recordings with blur or solid-color masks. Draw a mask over any region and it will follow your content through zoom, pan, and cinematic tilt automatically.
Clip speed control — Change the playback speed of individual video clips (0.25× – 4×) from the Video widget. Adjacent clips and zoom markers ripple automatically to stay in sync.
Diagnostic logs in feedback — When sending a bug report, you can now opt in to attach recent app logs so issues are easier to diagnose.
Fixed — Camera feed was not visible in exported videos.
Added cinematic zoom — a new zoom preset with depth-of-field blur, screen tilt, background fade, and 3D perspective. Can be added from the zoom widget or directly from the timeline. Tilt direction (left or right) is user-controlled per clip, defaulting to left.
Camera overlay position is now tracked per clip, allowing the camera bubble to follow different positions across clips.
Camera widget controls updated: shape, mirror, roundness, shadow, and zoom response are now organized into labeled sections.
Cursor widget now has an enable/disable toggle and exposes a continuous tracking setting.
You can now add background music to your recordings. Open the new Music widget from the sidebar, click Add Music, and pick any MP3, WAV, M4A, or AAC file — it appears as a track on the timeline and loops automatically for the full duration of your clip.
- Multiple tracks — add as many tracks as you need; each appears as Track 1, Track 2, etc. with a timestamp range
- Volume control — adjust each track independently with the volume slider in the expanded panel
- Fit to video — right-click any music clip on the timeline to stretch it to the full video length in one click
## Settings & Language
Added a Settings panel accessible from the top nav. You can now set your name and email (used for crash reports and analytics) and switch the app language without restarting.
## Internationalization
Screenforge is now available in six additional languages: German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese. The language can be changed at any time from Settings → Language.
## New Wallpapers
Three new background wallpapers are available in the Frame widget: Shadeshifter (soft blue abstract), Ember (fiery orange-purple wave), and Sparkle (neon light streaks on dark).
## Support Modal
Added a Ko-fi support prompt that appears at usage milestones to help sustain solo development.
You can now use any image from your computer as a wallpaper background. Click the + tile in the wallpaper grid, pick an image, and it appears in the grid as a selectable preset — selected instantly. Your custom wallpaper is also correctly applied when you export.
## 6 new wallpaper presets
The built-in wallpaper collection has been refreshed with six new backgrounds alongside the existing set.
## Clip transitions (Video panel)
A new Video panel lets you add animated transitions between your recording clips. Choose from fade, fade to white, slide (up / down / left / right), grow, shrink, and blur — each with an adjustable duration.
You can now add a Transition In on the first clip for a polished intro effect, and a Transition Out on the last clip for a clean outro.
## Canvas aspect ratio selector
A new aspect ratio picker in the top bar lets you choose the output shape of your canvas: Auto (matches your recording), Widescreen (16:9), Story (9:16), Square (1:1), Portrait (4:5), or Landscape (4:3).
## Recording list now shows duration
Each project in the recordings list now displays its total timeline duration so you can spot the right clip at a glance.
You can now style your captions exactly how you want them. A new Appearance panel lets you choose from 12 curated fonts, adjust size, toggle bold and italic, set text color and opacity, control the background pill color, opacity, and corner radius, and place captions at the top, center, or bottom of the frame. Each setting resets back to defaults with a single click.
Karaoke-style word highlighting has been upgraded to use your chosen highlight color, with future words fading to 40% opacity so the active word always stands out clearly.
Right-clicking a caption segment now shows a delete option, alongside the existing double-click-to-edit shortcut.
Recordings without an audio track now show a clear message in the Captions panel instead of a disabled transcribe button with no explanation.
Export quality — sharper unzoomed sections on Retina displays
When exporting a Retina Mac recording, unzoomed sections now receive an automatic sharpening pass tuned to the source-to-output downscale ratio. Previously the sharpening filter only activated during zoom clips, causing a visible quality gap between zoomed and normal shots. The filter now runs throughout the entire export, with the strength scaling up further as you zoom in.
Crop editing fixes
The crop overlay no longer jumps or misaligns while dragging handles. The preview container and the Pixi canvas now stay locked to the full source geometry during editing, so what you see matches what you drag.
Playback — text clips deselect on play
Pressing play while a text clip is selected now deselects it automatically, preventing the text editor from staying open while video plays back.
Add Text widget for creating styled text overlays on screen recordings. Text clips can be placed, resized, and dragged directly on the canvas preview. Each clip supports rich formatting (font, size, bold, italic, underline, horizontal and vertical alignment, roundness), text and background color with opacity, timeline-based in/out animations (fade, slide-up, slide-down), and is fully rendered in exported video.
Fixed a black screen that appeared when playing across a deleted segment boundary. Previously, deleting a middle segment and playing through the resulting cut would show a black frame lasting as long as the deleted segment. Transitions between segments now fade out and fade in smoothly regardless of whether segments are contiguous or separated by a delete.
Fixed pending continue recording state and audio clip issue
Video clips on the timeline can now be moved freely to any position, including back to the start. Previously, cutting a clip and deleting the first portion would leave the remaining clip stuck — it couldn't be dragged to position zero or past where adjacent clips used to be. Clips now move just like zoom clips: no ordering restrictions, full freedom to reposition anywhere on the timeline.
Fixed a bug where manually added zoom clips had no effect. Auto-generated zoom clips were always sorted by time, but clips added by hand were appended to the end of the list. Since the zoom renderer uses binary search, unsorted clips were silently skipped during playback and export.
Main window opens on launch — The editor now opens automatically when the app starts. Previously, only the floating recording toolbar appeared on launch, requiring a manual step to reach the editor.
Fix timeline jitter — Moving the mouse over the timeline no longer causes stuttering or jittering. The ghost zone indicator that appears in empty timeline lanes was triggering a full re-render of the timeline on every pixel of mouse movement, and additionally re-rendering during drag operations, which disrupted clip dragging. All three causes have been fixed.
Append recording — You can now extend an existing recording directly from the timeline. Hover past the last clip in the video track to reveal a "+" button, click it, and the recording toolbar opens in append mode (indicated by an "Appending to timeline" badge). Record normally with any mic and camera combination you choose, stop when done, and the new clip is automatically joined onto your existing recording and placed as a new segment in the timeline. The append is undoable with Cmd+Z.
Camera Follow mode — The Cursor widget now has a "Camera Follow" section with two modes. Smooth (default) keeps the existing behavior where the camera continuously tracks the cursor inside a zoom clip. Fixed locks the camera in place and only snaps to a new position when the cursor moves outside the visible frame — useful for recordings where you want a stable, minimal-movement look.
Export: no black bars for full-screen recordings — Exporting without a background (padding set to 0) now produces a video that matches the recording's native aspect ratio exactly. Previously, 16:10 MacBook recordings would export with letterbox bars on the sides. The output is now cropped to the content with no bars and no clipping.
Clip-boundary fade — When a project contains multiple video segments, the export now adds a short crossfade at the cut points between clips so transitions look polished rather than abrupt.
Timeline ghost zone: append-or-insert dropdown — Clicking the "+" ghost on an empty section of the video track now opens a small dropdown. "Record more" launches the recording toolbar in append mode (same as before). An "Insert clip" option is shown as a coming-soon teaser for an upcoming feature.
Timeline multi-select — Hold ⌘/Ctrl and click to select multiple clips at once, then delete them all in one go. Press ⌘A to select all clips, Escape to clear the selection.
Improved audio waveform — Waveform bars are denser, vertically centred, and auto-normalise to the loudest peak in the clip so quiet recordings no longer appear flat.
Audio track visibility — The audio lane only appears when you recorded microphone audio; recordings without a separate audio track no longer show an empty lane.
Tooltips across the UI — Timeline toolbar buttons (undo, redo, split, play/pause, stop, zoom), layer visibility toggles, and all sidebar nav icons now show hover tooltips.
Clickable indicator clips — Clicking a mouse-click or keyboard indicator in the timeline now seeks the playhead to that moment.
Rounded timeline clips — Clip corners are more rounded and content is correctly clipped inside the clip boundary.
Add teleprompter — a floating, always-on-top speaker notes window that never appears in recordings.
- Open it from the 3-dot menu in the toolbar; a spinner shows while it loads and a checkmark confirms it's ready
- Write your script in Edit mode, then hit Start to begin auto-scrolling
- In Play mode: pause/resume by clicking the text or pressing Space, restart from the toolbar, adjust font size (A− / A+) and scroll speed from the bottom bar, press Escape to go back to editing
- Script, font size, and speed are saved between sessions
- Teleprompter closes automatically when the recording stops
Captions now generate reliably in the packaged app. Fixed an issue where transcription would fail silently on first run after installation.
The editor now runs noticeably smoother, especially on older or lower-end Macs. Playback, scrubbing, and adjusting settings like zoom, blur backgrounds, and keyboard shortcuts should feel more responsive with less stuttering.
Fixed a crash that occurred when generating captions in the packaged app. The transcription engine's native libraries are now correctly extracted alongside their companion files, allowing them to load properly at runtime.
Sharper recordings and smoother preview. Recordings now capture at your display's full native resolution, so exported videos are crisp even on Retina and high-DPI screens. Preview playback is kept lightweight so it stays smooth while you edit — a small "Preview" badge in the corner of the canvas lets you know the export will always be full quality.
Captions — When keyboard shortcut captions and transcription captions are both active, the keyboard caption now floats above the transcription caption so both are fully visible at the same time.