Notate

Notate is a macOS menu bar application for annotating anything visible on screen. It addresses situations where pointing at elements proves more effective than written descriptions, such as design reviews, motion feedback, and product walkthroughs. The tool supports both human collaborators and coding agents through its annotation and export options.

It provides the ability to freeze the screen at the moment of activation, capturing open menus, hover states, and focus indicators while preventing any underlying movement during annotation. Users can also record frames over time, producing a candle timeline that allows scrubbing and annotation of individual frames. Annotation occurs without switching tools: clicking places a numbered pin, dragging creates an arrow, and closing a loop generates a clean shape based on the gesture.

Exports are prepared for agents in the form of markdown that an agent can act upon, alongside images that incorporate the annotations. Identical frames are deduplicated with gap markers to maintain an accurate representation of the captured sequence. Smart cropping automatically focuses the export on a single window when all marks appear inside it rather than the full desktop. Completed work is stored in portable archive format that permits reopening a session to resume annotation later.

The application is delivered as a native menu bar app requiring macOS 15 or later. Source code is available on GitHub. It is intended for scenarios involving visual communication with humans or AI coding agents.