F
Fair warning up front: I made this, so I'm biased.
I'm the person my family and coworkers ask when they can't figure something out on their Mac. For years my answer was the same: screenshots, cropped by hand, arrows drawn in Preview, pasted into a document, sent off. Three weeks later someone asks the same question, the app has updated, and half the screenshots are wrong.
StepGrab lives in the menu bar. You hit record, do the task once, and stop. Every click comes back as an annotated screenshot with a numbered arrow on what you clicked and the step written out beside it. Export as a GIF, a PDF or an MP4.
A few things that probably matter to this crowd specifically:
It runs entirely on your Mac. The step descriptions are written by Apple's on-device model, there is no account, nothing gets uploaded, and it works with the network switched off. It is a native app, not a web view in a wrapper.
Pricing is $9.99 a year or $44.99 once, and the one-time option is the point rather than an afterthought. The free tier gives you 10 steps per guide and 5 guides with GIF export, or 20 steps and 20 guides once you sign in.
Honest comparison: Scribe and Tango do this well and are more polished in places. They are web-first, subscription-only, and they process your recordings on their servers. If that does not bother you, they are good tools. It bothered me, which is why this exists.
The app is Mac-only, but the guides are not. Most of what any of us documents sits in a browser or a web app, so a guide recorded on a Mac reads the same for the colleague on Windows who asked for it.
Since I said I would name where it falls short: the step descriptions are solid when a control carries a text label and go vague when it doesn't. Anything distributed through the Mac App Store is sandboxed, so I can't read the Accessibility API to find out what a button is actually called, and for an unlabelled toolbar icon I'm working from OCR and position instead. That layer is still in development, and I'll take any suggestion for improving it in the meantime.
Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/stepgrab/id6760129490
Screenshots and a demo: https://stepgrab.net
Happy to answer anything, including how the capture works.
Fair warning up front: I made this, so I'm biased.
I'm the person my family and coworkers ask when they can't figure something out on their Mac. For years my answer was the same: screenshots, cropped by hand, arrows drawn in Preview, pasted into a document, sent off. Three weeks later someone asks the same question, the app has updated, and half the screenshots are wrong.
StepGrab lives in the menu bar. You hit record, do the task once, and stop. Every click comes back as an annotated screenshot with a numbered arrow on what you clicked and the step written out beside it. Export as a GIF, a PDF or an MP4.
A few things that probably matter to this crowd specifically:
It runs entirely on your Mac. The step descriptions are written by Apple's on-device model, there is no account, nothing gets uploaded, and it works with the network switched off. It is a native app, not a web view in a wrapper.
Pricing is $9.99 a year or $44.99 once, and the one-time option is the point rather than an afterthought. The free tier gives you 10 steps per guide and 5 guides with GIF export, or 20 steps and 20 guides once you sign in.
Honest comparison: Scribe and Tango do this well and are more polished in places. They are web-first, subscription-only, and they process your recordings on their servers. If that does not bother you, they are good tools. It bothered me, which is why this exists.
The app is Mac-only, but the guides are not. Most of what any of us documents sits in a browser or a web app, so a guide recorded on a Mac reads the same for the colleague on Windows who asked for it.
Since I said I would name where it falls short: the step descriptions are solid when a control carries a text label and go vague when it doesn't. Anything distributed through the Mac App Store is sandboxed, so I can't read the Accessibility API to find out what a button is actually called, and for an unlabelled toolbar icon I'm working from OCR and position instead. That layer is still in development, and I'll take any suggestion for improving it in the meantime.
Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/stepgrab/id6760129490
Screenshots and a demo: https://stepgrab.net
Happy to answer anything, including how the capture works.
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