Annotate Files

🎯 Highlights

Annotate gets a floating overlay toolbar with live shortcuts, in-overlay color and size quick pickers, smoother native-rate drawing, background dimming for the cursor spotlight, and optional sound feedback with five themes.

🚀 New Features

Floating Overlay Toolbar (#75, [#87], [#89], [#90])

• Live Toolbar: A bottom-centered bar on every overlay shows the tool shortcuts, active color, line width, and fade state, with clickable chips for tools, pickers, fade, undo, delete, and clear
• Draggable: Drag the bar anywhere by its glass surface. Its position is remembered per display and stays within screen bounds
• Neutral Glass Selection: A sliding glass lens marks the active tool, keeping glyphs and keycaps legible regardless of the drawing color. Uses native Liquid Glass on macOS Tahoe with an adaptive fallback on older releases
• Keyboard Shortcut: Toggle it with Option + Command + T, from the status bar menu, or in General settings

In-Overlay Quick Pickers (#73, [#95])

• Color and Size Pickers: Press C or W to open a glass picker right on the overlay instead of a menu bar popover. Tap, hold, click, or type a digit to choose; press the same key or Escape to dismiss
• Contextual Size Ladders: The size picker adapts to the active tool with stroke, text, and counter ladders
• Bracket Stepping: Step through sizes with [ and ]
• Clearer Layout: Shortcut digits now sit clear of the swatch selection ring (#95)

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/089a9e19-3d69-43d7-85f2-85442aca249b

Cursor Spotlight Background Dimming (#91, [#93])

• Dim Background: Darken the whole screen except a clear circle around the cursor, keeping the audience's attention on the pointer
• Dimming Amount: Adjust how dark the background gets, from 20% to 90%
• Dim Automatically: Optionally turn dimming on whenever the spotlight is enabled
• Keyboard Shortcut: A new Toggle Background Dimming shortcut in Settings > Shortcuts, unassigned by default. Turning dimming on also enables the spotlight if needed

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7bde71ef-33f5-4bab-ace9-ba2528e63de8

Sound Feedback (#74, [#78], [#85])

• Overlay and Clear Sounds: Distinct cues for overlay on, overlay off, and clear all
• Five Sound Themes: Choose between Chalk, Paper, Marker, Pencil, and Typewriter in General settings. Changing the theme previews it immediately
• Off by Default: Sounds are opt-in via the Play sounds setting

Text Label Improvements (#76, [#84], [#86])

• Live Font Sizing: Font sizes now range from 12 to 120 pt. Step an active field with Command + + and Command + -
• Background Pills: Toggle a rounded background behind a label with Command + B, configurable in Tools settings
• Sticky Text Tool: The text tool now stays active after placing a label, like every other tool. A new Switch to Select after placing text setting lands you in Select with the label selected instead
• Escape Commits: Escape now commits a label instead of discarding it, matching Excalidraw and tldraw. Command + Enter also commits
• Text Fades Too: Text annotations now fade out alongside other temporary annotations

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/e84f764a-6ec4-4ba5-b653-b06935c9efec

Smoother Drawing (#72)

• Native-Rate Input: Reworks the drawing internals so freehand strokes are captured at the input device's native rate, with incremental paths and dirty-rect redraws for lower latency
• Consistent Widths: Pen and highlighter selection, drawing, and erasing now match the visible stroke width

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9fd458d2-aba4-4c2a-9a03-c0c61da867d6

Shortcut Clearing (#94)

• Clear vs Restore: Each shortcut row now has separate buttons to clear the binding (Not Set) or restore that row's default. Cleared shortcuts never fire
• Conflict Warning: Restoring a default warns when that key is already assigned elsewhere

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Toolbar drags no longer switch tools (#89): A drag that started on a tool chip used to select it on mouse-up
• Text near screen edges (#76): Improves text sizing, placement, and hit detection near display edges
• Undo selection (#86): Undoing a selected label no longer leaves a stale selection box at the screen origin

🔧 Improvements

• Code Quality:
• Sparkle no longer starts a real updater under xctest, which was hanging CI runs for six hours (#79)
• CI jobs now time out after 20 minutes (#79)
• Restores the spotlight visibility regression test and names the dimming and spotlight layers so tests select them explicitly (#92)
• Test suite grows to over 530 tests covering the toolbar, pickers, sounds, text, and dimming
• Release Process: The release workflow now keeps MARKETING_VERSION in sync with the release tag (#88)
• Documentation: README documents the toolbar, quick pickers, sound themes, text shortcuts, dimming, and shortcut clearing

👋 New Contributors

• @kingbootoshi made their first contribution in https://github.com/epilande/Annotate/pull/72
• @zigius made their first contribution in https://github.com/epilande/Annotate/pull/91

📝 Full Changelog

Full Changelog: https://github.com/epilande/Annotate/compare/v1.5.0...v1.6.0