Last time I posted about StepGrab here, most of the feedback came down to the same thing: the arrows. They point at the click, which is correct, but sometimes that means covering the exact button you were trying to show — and the only fix was to record the whole thing again.

That's what 1.4 is. There's an editor window now:

• Drag the numbered badge to change the arrow's direction and length
• Drag the middle of the line to bend it around whatever it was covering, or flip an elbow to the other side
• Click the step description to rewrite it — clear the field and the generated sentence comes back
• Reorder steps by dragging, delete them, undo anything with ⌘Z
• The preview renders the actual export per format — PDF, HTML, GIF, Mobile — so what you're looking at is the file you'll get, not an approximation of it

For those who don't know the app: StepGrab sits in the menu bar. You start a recording, click through whatever you want to document, and it takes a screenshot on every click, draws the arrow, numbers the step and writes a sentence describing what you did. Then it exports as a PDF, an HTML page, Markdown, a GIF, an MP4 or a portrait video. Mostly useful for support docs, onboarding, SOPs — anything you'd otherwise end up explaining twice.

On the free tier and pricing, since that came up here too: the recording quota is gone. Free is now 15 steps per guide and as many guides as you want, with GIF export, and no account — you just open the app and record.

Pro unlocks the other formats (PDF, HTML, Markdown, MP4, portrait video), raises the step limit and lets you put your own logo and footer on exports. $2.99/month with a 3-day trial, $12.99/year, or $44.99 once. The yearly works out at about a third of paying monthly, which is deliberate — I'd rather people stay than churn.

Everything runs locally. No account, no upload, no telemetry. macOS 14+.

Still very interested in what's annoying about it — the arrow thing came from here, so it clearly works.

→ StepGrab on the Mac App Store

Screenshots and a longer walkthrough at stepgrab.net if you'd rather look before installing.

Mods gave me the okay. I'm writing my bachelor's thesis at WU Vienna on queues at fitting rooms, and I need people who actually shop in stores.

8 min, anonymous, no names or email, university server, 18+: https://soscisurvey.wu.ac.at/waiting_at_fitting_rooms/

The thing I'm testing: a queue number you pull with your phone so you keep browsing instead of standing in line. It doesn't make the wait shorter, just less like waiting.

I think it might not work. You'd have to pull the number before you've finished picking things out, and then get called at the wrong moment.

Menswear fitting rooms are emptier than womenswear ones, so this may be less of an issue here than I assume. That's partly why I'm asking. Does a queue change what you take in, or do you just wait?

I worked for a clothing store and Saturdays at the fitting rooms were the thing that ruined me.

I'm back at university now and I ended up writing my bachelor's thesis about exactly this. The idea I keep coming back to is a digital queue number — you scan a code, keep browsing, get a ping when a room is free. Nobody waits less. It just isn't spent standing in a line.

What I don't know, and what you do: whether that would actually survive contact with a real shop floor, or whether it just moves the problem somewhere else. My guess is the people who ignore the ping become your problem instead.

If anyone's up for it, there's a short anonymous survey (about 8 min, no names, no email, runs on my university's server): https://soscisurvey.wu.ac.at/waiting_at_fitting_rooms/

But honestly I'm more interested in what you'd say in the comments.

I'm writing my bachelor's thesis at WU Vienna about queues at fitting rooms — whether ideas that work for waiting online (a virtual queue number, a live availability screen, something to do while you wait) also work in a physical store.

About 8 minutes, completely anonymous: no names, no email addresses, no IP addresses.

https://soscisurvey.wu.ac.at/waiting_at_fitting_rooms/

I'm writing my bachelor's thesis at WU Vienna about queues at fitting rooms — specifically whether ideas that work for waiting online (a virtual queue number, a live availability screen, something to do while you wait) could also work in a physical store.

About 8 minutes, completely anonymous: no names, no email addresses, no IP addresses.

https://soscisurvey.wu.ac.at/waiting_at_fitting_rooms/

Happy to post the results here once I'm done. Thanks!

Hallo zusammen,

ich schreibe an der WU Wien meine Bachelorarbeit über Warteschlangen an Umkleidekabinen — genauer darüber, ob Ideen, die beim Warten im Netz funktionieren, auch im Laden etwas bringen: eine virtuelle Wartenummer, eine Anzeige mit freien Kabinen, oder etwas zu tun während des Wartens.

Der Fragebogen ist auf Englisch, dauert etwa 8 Minuten und ist vollständig anonym.

https://soscisurvey.wu.ac.at/waiting_at_fitting_rooms/

Danke euch! Die Ergebnisse teile ich gerne, wenn ich durch bin

I'm writing my bachelor's thesis at WU Vienna about queues at fitting rooms — specifically whether ideas that work for waiting online (a virtual queue number, a live availability screen, something to do while you wait) could also work in a physical store.

About 8 minutes, completely anonymous: no names, no email addresses, no IP addresses.

https://soscisurvey.wu.ac.at/waiting_at_fitting_rooms/

Happy to post the results here once I'm done. Thanks!

Last week I posted here about 1-star reviews getting to me. Most of you said some version of the same thing: it's usually not bugs, it's the app failing to explain itself. u/elementik4 split it into two buckets for me — wrong-fit user is a store listing problem, missing a setting that exists is an onboarding problem. That split stuck with me all week.

So I opened my own setup wizard and read it like someone who had never seen the app.

Five pages. Welcome screen. A list of six features. A sign-in prompt. A permission request. Then "you're all set", the window closes, and you're looking at a menu bar icon with nothing in it. Not one of those pages does anything for the user. I built a slideshow and called it onboarding.

Then I went reading. Apple's HIG is pretty blunt about it ("education isn't a substitute for great app design"), and there's an NN/g study with 70 people, tutorial vs no tutorial. The tutorial group wasn't faster and wasn't more successful. They rated the app as harder. That one stung.

What's changing:

• Feature list is gone. It was already in the help window.
• Sign-in moves to the end, after you've seen it work.
• New page 3: you record something right now, with a suggested 20 second task.
• New page 4: the actual screenshots you just captured, plus an export button.

u/elementik4 also pointed me at TipKit, so the rest of the features get surfaced later when they're relevant instead of all at once up front. u/andreimotin said to test it on someone who has never seen the app, not on myself, so I'm doing that this weekend with people who aren't developers. u/TravelCodeRepeat asked whether there's a contact button inside the app. There wasn't. There is now.

Three things I could use help with:

1. Screen Recording permission. Do you hard-gate the wizard on it, or let people click past it? The app does nothing without it, so letting someone through means they get a broken app. But blocking them on page 2 feels aggressive.
2. The first recording. Suggest a specific task, or let them pick their own? Suggested is faster, their own is more relevant to them. Can't decide.
3. Small stuff. Has anyone seen a first-run detail in another Mac app that you thought was clever? I mean the little things. A permission row that flips to a checkmark the second you grant it. Something that saves one click, or one moment of "wait, what now". Those details seem to be what makes an app feel finished, and I'd rather steal a good one than invent a mediocre one. This is also just a good excuse to hear which apps got it right, since I only ever see my own.

Thanks again to everyone who replied last time. It genuinely changed what I'm building this month.

I'm the solo dev behind a small Mac app, a few weeks into being live, and I wanted to be honest about the part nobody really talks about.

The negative feedback gets to me. One critical review sits with me longer than ten good ones lift me up. I know that's lopsided and probably not rational, but it genuinely affects my mood for a day. Is that just how it is early on, or does it fade?

The other thing I keep noticing: when I dig into the harsher reviews, most of them aren't bugs. They're people expecting the app to do something it doesn't, or not finding a setting that's already there. My first instinct was "that's user error," but the more I sit with it, the more it feels like my problem, not theirs. If people don't discover a feature or misread what the app is for, that's me failing to make the app explain itself.

Here's the part I keep chewing on, and maybe I'm being naive. If someone doesn't like the app, or wants control it doesn't give them, docking a star or two feels completely fair to me. What throws me is a one-star for something that works exactly as described. In my head, one star is for a bug, or an app that doesn't do what it promises. "It does what it says, but it's not for me" feels like a reason to move on, not a one-star. But maybe that's just ego, and a rating is really just "did this deliver enough for me." How do you read it?

Either way, I'm not just venting. I'm building a proper in-app guided tour, something that walks you through your first real use instead of dropping you in cold, and surfaces the settings people keep missing.

Questions for people further along than me:

1. How do you stop the bad reviews from wrecking your headspace? Did it get easier?
2. Is "most negative feedback is really an onboarding gap" everyone's experience, or just my stage?
3. And honestly, how do you think about what a one-star should mean?

Not looking for reassurance, genuinely trying to learn from people who've been through it.

The deal first: lifetime Pro drops from $49.99 to $34.99 with the offer code FIRSTWEEK30P, valid until July 17 and capped at 1000 redemptions total. Redeem it in the App Store app (App Store menu, then Redeem Gift Card or Code). There is also a yearly option at $9.99, and the base app is free with a usable tier (5 steps per guide, 10 guides, GIF export), so you can test it before paying anything.

Background, because I made this: I'm the person my family and coworkers ask when they don't know how to do something on their Mac. For years my answer was screenshots, cropped by hand, arrows drawn in Preview, pasted into a document. Three weeks later someone asks the same question, the app got an update, and half my screenshots are wrong.

StepGrab is what came out of six months of fixing that for myself. It sits in the menu bar, you hit record, do the task once, and stop. Every click turns into an annotated screenshot on its own, with an arrow on the thing you clicked and step text written by an on-device AI model ("Click Export in the toolbar"). Fully offline, no account, nothing leaves your Mac. Exports as GIF for free, PDF and MP4 with Pro.

Released last week and there are still codes left. Happy to answer questions.

PS: there is also an yearly subscription for 9,99$

Before anything else: I read rule 10 and this is hopefully not that. There's nothing built yet and nothing to show, which is sort of the point. I want to steal this sub's collective brain before I decide what to build, since you're the people who'd actually use it.

Quick context: I make a small Mac app (StepGrab) that turns a screen recording into a step-by-step guide, one screenshot per click with the step text written on-device, exports to GIF, PDF or MP4. Zero Shortcuts support today. App Intents are next on my list. I'm deliberately not linking it, this isn't meant as promo.

What I'm trying to figure out with you: for the apps in your workflows, which actions do you actually run regularly, and which sounded good on the box but turned into shelf-ware? My current guesses are a "start recording" action, a "stop and export" with the format as a parameter, and guides as proper entities so the exported file can get passed down the chain (rename it, mail it, drop it in a shared folder). But I'm guessing.

The thing I can't answer alone is whether Spotlight/Siri triggering is the valuable half, or whether it's really about the file coming out the other end so the rest of your shortcut can grab it. And maybe there's a trigger type (folder, time, focus mode) that makes a documentation tool click into place in a way I'm not seeing.

If you've ever chained a capture or export app into a bigger workflow, I'd love to hear what made it stick, or what made you delete it after a week. Both teach me the same amount.

https://reddit.com/link/1utemx5/video/mrt5i901ckch1/player

Quick follow-up: I posted StepGrab here about a week ago. It's a Mac app where you record a task once and it turns into a numbered step-by-step guide, screenshots and written steps included. The launch went better than expected, and the feedback came with homework. A buyer found German quotation marks in his English PDFs, someone else called the design old school, and honestly both were right.

So here's what shipped in 1.2:

• AI step text: on-device AI (Apple Intelligence) writes a natural description for every step. Nothing leaves your Mac.
• Latency-free capture: recording no longer adds input lag.
• Social export: turns a guide into a MacBook-mockup video in 9:16, 1:1 or 4:5, so a guide doubles as a demo clip.
• Choose content: pick exactly which screen to record, external displays included.
• Share as ZIP: PDF, GIF and MP4 together in one file.
• In-app help that's actually searchable now.
• Plus the unglamorous part: translation fixes across all languages and a redesign along Apple's current HIG.

Next on the list is a proper review window before export, where you can see all steps at full size and delete or reorder them. That one came straight from a Reddit comment too.

If you tried the first version and something bugged you, tell me. The changelog above is mostly your doing anyway.

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/stepgrab/id6760129490 Site: stepgrab.net

For a while my hardest documentation problem wasn't writing the docs, it was stopping them from going stale. An app ships a UI update, half my screenshots now point at buttons that moved, people quietly stop trusting the doc, and a few weeks later nobody opens it.

Most of the capture tools I know (Scribe, Tango) are built for the browser. Fine for SaaS, not much help for what I actually document most: native macOS apps and system settings. So a good chunk of my process is still manual screenshotting, and those are the screenshots that rot first.

I care more about the maintenance side than the creation side, so I'm curious how you handle it. Do you review on a schedule, or only when a release breaks something and someone complains? Do you keep steps text-heavy and screenshot-light on purpose so there's less to redo? And for non-browser stuff, has any capture-and-update routine ever actually survived long-term for you?

Full disclosure: the native-app gap annoyed me enough that I built a small Mac tool for the capture part myself. I'd rather talk about the workflow than the tool, so I'm keeping it out of the post, but I'll drop it in the comments if anyone wants it. Mostly I want to hear what's kept your docs alive, because "just screenshot it all again" obviously doesn't scale.