Prequel
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Releases

Releases

What we shipped

Prequel updates itself, so you are usually on the newest of these already. The app tells you when there is one waiting.

  1. v0.0.20

    • The camera and microphone choosers in the dock are macOS menus. They open above the panel, fully drawn, every time — they used to open blank now and then, or at the wrong size for a moment before settling.
    • The permissions warning opens the same way. Each missing permission is a line with what it costs underneath and an Allow beside it, and there is a Restart Prequel item when macOS only reads the grant at launch.
    • The chevron beside a device name turns to point at its menu while the menu is open.
    • A share link opens in a player of Prequel's own rather than the browser's. The keyboard works from the moment the page opens — space to play, J and L to jump, the arrows to nudge, a number to jump to a tenth, and ? for the rest — and there is a speed control, picture in picture and full screen.
    • A shared recording has chapters. They are written from the transcript when you press Share, drawn on the scrub bar and listed beside the video, and a click on one goes there. Nothing to do on your side: any recording that was transcribed gets them.
    • A shared recording has subtitles, off until the viewer turns them on. Made from the same transcript, so a recording exported without captions can still be read along with.
    • A pointer that stops now stays put. It used to creep, very slowly, towards wherever it went next for as long as it rested — in the preview and in the export — and then set off from somewhere it had never been. Every recording gets this, not just new ones.
    • Your profile picture. If you signed in with Google it is already there, beside your name in the library and on every link you share; anyone can set one, or change it, from the new Account page — pick a photo, drag and zoom to crop it, and that is what people see.
    • A shared recording shows who shared it: your picture, or a pattern of your own if you have none, beside the title.
    • Remove background is one of the camera's shapes now, first in the row, rather than a switch of its own above it. Pick any other shape to bring the background back. Every shape in the row names itself when you rest the pointer on it.
    • A corner of the screen that sits under the camera can still be dragged. The camera used to take the grab, so resizing the screen out from under the bubble meant moving the bubble first.

  2. v0.0.19

    • The automatic zoom rests on the field you are typing into, rather than a little to one side of it. A field wider than the shot — a title box across a form — is framed from the end the text starts at, so the label and the first words are on screen rather than the empty middle of the box.
    • A field that merely has focus no longer counts as typing. A page that focuses its first box on arrival, or a chat box that keeps focus for the whole recording, used to pull every click around it into one long zoom held on the box until the end. The zoom now looks at a field only while you are typing into it, and follows the pointer the rest of the time.
    • Where a stretch of the recording has both clicks and typing, the zoom follows the pointer. A click says where to look; a focused box only says where the caret is.
    • The camera can stand on the background with no card around it. Remove background in the Camera panel cuts you out of the picture and drops the shape, shadow and border, so it is you over the wallpaper rather than a bubble in the corner. It keeps the size, zoom and framing you had, and you can push yourself half off any edge for a shot that runs out of frame. The mask is made while you record, so the switch is instant and works in the export too.
    • The switches in the editor's panels are drawn as macOS draws them.
    • The close button on the camera preview appears when the pointer is anywhere over the preview, rather than only once it reaches the button.

  3. v0.0.18

    • The editor has an Add Zoom button beside Split and Delete, and Z on the keyboard does the same. It adds a zoom where the playhead is — or, when one is already there, in the nearest free stretch beside it — and selects it, so the next thing you do is adjust it.
    • Hovering the zoom row shows the zoom a click will add, labelled Add Zoom, rather than an unmarked outline.
    • Resting the pointer on an icon in the dock, or on the editor's side rail, shows what it does. The first label waits a moment; after that they follow the pointer from icon to icon.

  4. v0.0.17

    • Exports use a fraction of the memory. The soundtrack was mixed whole before the first frame was drawn, which on a fifteen-minute edit was over a gigabyte. It is now mixed as it goes, and a long export holds steady at what a short one does.
    • Exporting a trimmed clip no longer fails before it starts.
    • A recording that macOS is not delivering frames for stops itself within two seconds and says so, rather than counting up for minutes and failing at the end. This is what a Screen Recording permission granted without restarting looks like.
    • The tray menu offers Record Entire Screen, Record a Window and Record an Area, so you can choose the source without opening the panel first.
    • A drawn area can be moved, and resized from its edges and corners, before you record it.
    • Settings lists the four permissions and what each is for, and offers a restart where a grant needs one to take effect. The version sits at the foot of the pane, beside Check for Updates.
    • The save dialog opens in Downloads rather than in the app's own recordings folder.
    • Changing a caption font or look keeps the captions on screen while the new ones draw, rather than blanking them for a moment.
    • The editor shows the recording once it has decoded, rather than a background with nothing on it for the first moment.
    • The library opens as fast with a thousand recordings as with twenty. It loads a screen at a time and fetches more as you scroll.
    • The timecode's digits roll as they change.
    • The dock no longer flashes a scrollbar when a camera is turned on, and its menus no longer open empty the first time.
    • When something goes wrong, the app tells us the shape of the failure, with every file path removed, so a bug that hits many people is seen without anyone having to write in.

  5. v0.0.16

    • Stopping a recording opens its editor again, and a recording you click opens rather than sitting on "Opening…".
    • Presets are your own. The community collection has gone — the looks the picker offers are the ones you saved.

  6. v0.0.15

    • Recording a screen or an area works again. In 0.0.14 the picker opened as an empty sheet of dimming, with no region to drag and no button to press.
    • Sign in comes back if you close the browser tab without finishing, rather than sitting on "Waiting for your browser…" until it gives up on its own.

  7. v0.0.14

    • Captions can be set in a face of your own: Helvetica Neue, Avenir Next, Futura, Georgia, Menlo and the rest of what your Mac already has.
    • Blur in is what a new recording starts with.
    • The inspector is rebuilt. Every control is one bar the same height with its own icon, sliders carry their name and reading inside the track, and a switch is a row you can press anywhere rather than a target the size of a thumbnail.
    • Panels are grouped, so Border, Shadow, Motion and Hiding each say what they are instead of leaving eight sliders in a column.
    • Colours are picked in the app rather than in the system panel, and the picker sits under the swatch it belongs to.
    • The timeline says which moment you are pointing at, not only which one you are on.
    • Playing selects the clip you are watching, and pressing a clip you are already editing moves the playhead to where you pressed rather than back to its start.
    • The app opens faster, and the recordings list no longer waits for the editor before it draws.
    • Presets. Dress a recording the way you like it, save the look, and put it on the next one — the arrangement, the background, the captions, the camera, the frame it was made in, and the way a zoom moves.
    • A logo of your own, anywhere in the frame, dragged where you want it and sized by its corner. It travels with a preset.
    • The camera takes a border and a roundness of its own, set where the camera is rather than in the frame around the recording.
    • The background can be thrown out of focus, so a busy wallpaper sits back and the recording reads.
    • Ten more pointers, for when a hammer or a frog says it better than an arrow does.
    • Guides while you drag. Both pictures snap to the middle of the frame, and the camera to the corners.
    • Press a picture in the preview and its panel opens — the camera, the recording, or the captions.
    • Right-click the timeline to split a clip where you pointed, remove one, or copy a zoom.
    • Give every clip the settings of the one in front of you, from any panel.
    • The dock is a little squarer at the corners.
    • Scrollbars in the inspector stay out of the way until you reach for them.
    • Choose a background of your own twice and you get the second one. It used to keep showing the first.
    • Stopping a recording opens its editor rather than the list of recordings.
    • SVGs work wherever an image does, and stay sharp at any size you export.

  8. v0.0.13

    • Captions are editable text. Open Edit captions in the inspector and type into the transcript.
    • Deleting a sentence in the transcript cuts that stretch of footage out of the video.
    • A new Blur in look brings each word into focus on the moment it is spoken. Minimal has gone.
    • Caption colour is chosen against whatever is behind the words, so they stay readable on light and dark footage alike.
    • The transcript follows the clip you have selected.

  9. v0.0.12

    • The camera can stand in the frame as a picture of its own rather than only as a bubble in a corner.
    • Zooms are drawn out along the timeline rather than dropped in at a point.
    • Prequel is source available, under a licence that turns into Apache-2.0.
    • Pay once or pay monthly, for the same app.

  10. v0.0.11

    • A frosted dock.
    • The pointer blurs as it moves, the way a real one does on camera.
    • The timeline says which clip it means.

  11. v0.0.10

    • Backgrounds are hosted rather than shipped inside the app, so the download is smaller and the catalogue can grow without an update.
    • The picker groups them.
    • The border follows a tilt.
    • Reopening a recording keeps the zooms it already had.

  12. v0.0.9

    • Captions, transcribed on your Mac while you record. Nothing is uploaded.
    • Caption settings belong to a clip, so a look can change part way through a take.
    • Cursor timing matches the picture.

  13. v0.0.8

    • The panel says when there is a newer version.
    • The pointer dips when it is clicked.
    • Your account sits at the foot of the sidebar instead of behind a pane.

  14. v0.0.7

    • The camera bubble moves out of the way of a zoom.
    • Your desktop picture is found on Macs whose wallpaper agent has moved.

  15. v0.0.6

    • A zoom slice is the part that is zoomed in, not the part that is arriving.
    • Settings moved into the window with your recordings.
    • A modern pointer shape, and new projects start on it.

  16. v0.0.5

    • Local recordings have a home of their own rather than a submenu of names.
    • The panel looks for an update when it opens.