u/Worldly-Egg-8681

Recording product demos used to be my personal hell.

I’d record the screen, watch it back, realize no one could see where I clicked, then spend 20 minutes in Premiere or ScreenFlow manually adding zooms, arrows, and highlights. It was tedious, and it killed my motivation to make tutorials.

I wanted a "record-and-done" workflow. So, I spent the last few months building Limelight.

It handles the "post-production" work while you record:

• Smart Auto-Zoom: It follows your cursor with smooth, cinematic motion. No more "where did the mouse go?" comments.
• Live Annotations: Draw or highlight directly on your screen while you talk.
• Spotlight/Dim: Focus attention exactly where it matters in real-time.
• Instant Export: High-quality MP4/GIF with no extra editing required.

I built this specifically for my own demos, but I’ve been using it for every walkthrough I make now. If you do any screen recording for work or side projects, I’d love for you to give it a spin and let me know if it actually saves you time.

It’s free to start:https://limelightmac.com

Would love your thoughts or any "must-have" features you think I'm missing.

I make a lot of quick walkthroughs, and I kept wanting to point at things and draw on the screen while recording — not just capture it flat. So I built a macOS tool that records your screen and lets you explain as you go.

You can:

– Auto-zoom that follows your cursor with smooth motion

– Draw / annotate on screen over any app while recording

– Spotlight the cursor, or dim everything but one region

– Export clean MP4/GIF with no watermark

I mainly use it for tutorials and product demos where people need to actually follow what I'm pointing at. Thought it might be useful for others doing the same.

It's free to start: https://limelightmac.com

Open to feedback or ideas if you check it out!

Building a Mac screen recorder.

Tried Google Ads first — didn't convert, and they suspended my account anyway.

Honestly a blessing. It pushed me to stop buying traffic and start ranking for stuff people already search for.

Slow grind — building pages, fixing a 7s load time, waiting to get indexed.

First full-price sale landed this week. 🌱

Anyone else had organic beat paid?

I'm a marketer, not an engineer. A few weeks ago I decided to vibe-code a real native macOS app, just to see how far I could actually get.

It's called Limelight — a screen recorder that auto-zooms into every click, smooths the cursor, and shows your keystrokes on screen, then exports a clean video. Fully offline.

What it does

• Cinematic auto-zoom into every click
• Smoothed cursor movement
• On-screen keystroke display as you type
• Clean, high-quality export — all offline

How I built it (the vibe-coding part)

• I drove an AI coding agent (Claude Code), described what I wanted, tested each build on my own Mac, and iterated. I wrote almost none of the Swift by hand.
• It's native, not a web wrapper — Swift/SwiftUI + ScreenCaptureKit for capture + AVFoundation for the export pipeline. I didn't know any of these APIs going in; I learned them by prompting, breaking things, and asking "why is this janky."
• Hardest part: the cinematic auto-zoom. Getting it to follow clicks smoothly instead of snapping took endless "that looks robotic, make it spring naturally" loops. Same with a high-quality offline export that didn't look compressed.
• Biggest lesson: vibe-coding the features was shockingly fast — I cloned the core of a $20/mo competitor in an afternoon. The actual hard part was everything around the code: getting found, SEO, distribution. Building isn't the moat anymore.

Why I'm posting

A few days ago, the founder of a Silicon Valley consulting firm — someone whose whole job is working with genuinely complex technical software — bought a lifetime license. My first full-price sale.

For a non-engineer who vibe-coded the whole thing, having a real technical professional look at it and decide it was worth paying for honestly made my month. It made the thing feel real.

For other non-engineers vibe-coding native apps — what's been the hardest part for you? The code, or everything after it?