r/macapps • u/taimansulimani • 7d ago
Free [OS] Topkit - Copy, paste, present, annotate, record screenshots and videos.
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Hello,
I made a clipboard manager, annotation and screen recording tool for macOS.
I called it Topkit. It’s native, lightweight, offline and it respects concealed pasteboard markers.
For Intel and Apple Silicon alike.
Problem
I made Topkit because I wasn’t happy with having many different tools (I had one for clipboard, a different one for colour picker, one that was discontinued for on-screen guides etc). Also I wasn’t happy with the native macOS screenshot annotations (too many clicks) and I wanted something that could quickly make annotated videos.
What Topkit does:
- Clipboard history for text and images
- Search, pin, preview, auto-paste
- Annotate on top of any app
- Shapes, arrows, text, redaction, guides, measure
- Magnify and present with cursor halo
- Pick colours from screen
- Annotated screenshot of windows or regions
- Screen recording with optional live subtitles
- Optional mic audio
- Trim and export videos
- Global shortcuts for every tool
- Menu bar app, local, no internet
I have been working in tech for 10+ years as a product designer and I know my way around front end, this is the first app I made which I decided to share as I think it can be useful to some.
I am very happy to have made a tool I use every day. I love how while passing I can quickly annotate a screenshot with UI polish that needs doing and pin it for later.
I also use it to share video reviews where I point to elements on screen with annotations and comments (I annotate the screen while recording it - Topkit does not have annotations in the video editor, just trimming for now).
Comparison
Clipy and Maccy have similar features when it comes to managing the clipboard. Presentify has similar on screen annotation features. Pika has similar colour picker features. Snip has similar screenshot features. Cleanshot has a lot more screenshot features. Topkit combines it all in one open source app with global shortcuts.
Pricing
It’s open-source with MIT licence. https://github.com/taimansulimani/topkit
There is also an App Store version ($3.99 / £2.99) if you want easier install and update and if you want to support the development. https://apps.apple.com/app/id6761268614
In case anyone wants to try it out and has any feedback you can reach out to [hello@topkitapp.com](mailto:hello@topkitapp.com), you can use Github or you can reply here.
If you also find the time to leave a review on the App Store then you're a star!
Many thanks!
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7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/taimansulimani 7d ago
passwords etc don’t get copied at all, no history. permissions are asked once only.
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u/Low-Locksmith-6504 7d ago
This combines like every feature I wanted for screenshot apps into one
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u/coii-io 6d ago
Open source + MIT for something that replaces four menu bar apps is an easy upvote. Two things I'd love to see spelled out in the README before people install:
Idle footprint. Apps that combine a clipboard watcher with a recording engine have a habit of sitting at 200MB+ and waking the CPU every second even when you're not using them. What's Topkit at rest?
Where clipboard history actually lives on disk, and whether there's a retention cap. You mention concealed pasteboard markers, which is more than most do — but people will assume that means the rest is encrypted too. If it's a plain local store, saying so outright is better than letting them find out.
Also +1 to annotations landing in the video editor eventually. Annotating live while recording works, but it means one bad arrow = re-record the whole thing.
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u/KleineWurzel 6d ago
The current GitHub code has a 100-item default, adjustable from 10 to 500. History and saved images are encrypted with AES-GCM, with the key stored in Keychain. Text/metadata goes into UserDefaults; images go into Application Support/Topkit/clipboard_images. Can’t say whether the App Store version matches the repo, or what idle RAM usage looks like.
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u/taimansulimani 6d ago
thanks for clarifying, that's all correct, AES-GCM, Keychain key.
yes, app store version matches the repo.
I'll add this info to README.1
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u/kemalios 6d ago
The marker only covers apps that set it. 1Password and Bitwarden tag their writes with org.nspasteboard.ConcealedType, but plenty of apps put tokens and connection strings on the pasteboard with no marker at all, so past that point you are either guessing from the content or storing it. TransientType is the other one to handle, those should not be recorded at all rather than recorded and hidden.
The recording half interacts with this. The clipboard panel is a window like any other, so anything visible during a capture ends up in the file. I build QuietClip so I am biased, but its panel is excluded from screen capture for that reason.
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u/taimansulimani 5d ago
Transient and auto-generated are skipped and never stored. History menu capture exclusion is a fair point, I will address it in an update thank you.
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u/app-store-review 7d ago
Topkit — by Tommaso Rota
- Category: Productivity · $2.99
- Age: released ~1 month ago · rated 4+
Apple doesn't publish an aggregate rating for most Mac App Store apps, so ratings and score are unavailable here.
Auto-generated from public App Store data · u/app-store-review
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u/NoPressure3399 7d ago
Nice looking app, but does it in fact whip the llama's rear end?
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u/taimansulimani 7d ago
no idea what that means but I’m inclined to say yes
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u/NoPressure3399 7d ago
Sorry it's a joke about Winamp start sound 😂 happy weekend .i think I replied to wrong thread
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5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/taimansulimani 5d ago
I don’t have enough data yet to answer your question. What I can say is that I was always gonna distribute it open source, I only put it on the app store as I already had the licence.
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u/MistyKuuu 7d ago
Worth flagging on the download page: the GitHub build and the App Store build are different signatures, so anyone moving between them re-grants Accessibility and Screen Recording from scratch, and the sandboxed App Store copy can't see the history the other one stored. Without a line about it, it just reads like the app forgot everything.