They say a picture is worth a thousand words. At work I end up taking a lot of screenshots when giving demos, or to help my colleagues reproduce a bug I’ve found, as screenshots make it so much easier to get my point across. Of course, macOS has a built-in screenshotting feature, but CleanShot X really takes this up a notch in a number of ways. Here are some of my favourite features.

Annotations

As soon as you capture your first screenshot, it goes into an area called Quick Access, where it waits until you need it. From there you can quickly bring up a full size preview of your screenshot, and easily add annotations including text, shapes, arrows, and more. From there you can simply drag your newly annotated screenshot directly into other apps, like Slack. There’s no need to save the file first, so you don’t end up with a desktop filled with junk you no longer need. The process is super slick, and saves me a ton of time throughout the day.

Quick Access can hold several screenshots until you’re ready to work with them, and it’ll even move between displays as you move your mouse, so they’re always nearby.

Video

Sometimes, a screenshot won’t cut it, you need to capture a short video. CleanShot has you covered here too. It can easily produce video clips either as MP4, or as GIF. The full size preview in this mode also lets you quickly trim the clip, and can even capture any audio your Mac is playing at the time.

This is very slick, and because CleanShot encodes the video efficiently, you end up with much smaller file sizes, which is perfect for sharing. I’ve found it also does a great job at producing compact GIFs, without the quality sacrifice you see in other solutions.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition or OCR is the process of capturing text from inside images. CleanShot has a built-in OCR reader that allows you to take a screenshot of any block of text, and convert it instantly into actual text which is placed on your clipboard for you to paste into other apps. I use this when doing tech support so if someone sends me a screenshot containing an error, I can easily copy the error message text from the image, and paste it into my search engine to help me troubleshoot the problem.

Customisation

There’s a lot of polish and attention to detail in CleanShot. For example, the developers realised that many people use personal photographs as their wallpaper, so there is an option to use different wallpaper when capturing a screenshot to keep that private. You can also go further by hiding your desktop icons completely, and choosing a plain colour for the background, which looks really tidy.

When capturing windows, you can choose whether the background is visible, and whether or not the window has its drop-shadow. You can also customise the image and video format to use when saving files.

Finally, there are even settings to capture the mouse cursor, highlight clicks, and display any keystrokes on screen, which I find useful when recording demos, and will really help your screencasts standout.

Summary

Overall, CleanShot X is one of those fantastic little applications that really feels at home on a Mac. Powerful, yet easy to use, with a great fit and finish, as they say on their website, it really does feel like 7 apps in one, and I highly recommend it.

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Last year I wrote how I’d switched from Docker Desktop to Colima, but later that same year I stumbled across a brand new solution that was in development, called OrbStack. The author was pretty communicative on Mastodon and so I downloaded it during the beta to take it for a spin, and was immediately blown away.

Containers should be a joy to use, not something you have to put up with. Let’s build the future of dev envs.

https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1750965469518176438

So what makes it so special? Well let’s start with the performance. OrbStack is fast. How fast is it? Well I’ll let one of my Mastodon posts answer that question:

That’s right, after rebooting my Mac, the OrbStack user interface was up and running before the macOS Dock had even finished sliding up from the bottom of the screen. Everything about OrbStack is so fast you never feel like you’re waiting for it, it just gets out of the way and let’s you get on with things.

Another thing I really appreciate is the entire user interface is native SwiftUI. There’s no slow clunky Electron code to be found here. This means not only does the app perform faster, it also feels right at home on macOS. Controls behave how you’d expect, and it follow the system conventions properly.

Like Colima, OrbStack is a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop. This means you can install it over the top of your existing Docker Desktop setup, and it will Just Work™. In fact it will offer to automatically import your existing container images and stotage volumes when you first run it, which is a nice touch.

Value added

There are a ton of features in OrbStack that really demonstrate the attention to detail and care, which shines throughout the product. They’re so numerous in fact I could spend a week talking about them, but instead I’m going to list a few of them here:

• Automatic HTTPS certificates and DNS for your containers
• Rosetta support for transparent x86 emulation
• Start/stop containers from the macOS menubar (including Compose projects)
• Explore Docker images directly using Finder (they can even show up as disk mounts)
• Two-way file sync between containers and your local filesystem
• Easily search through logs with a native log viewer (supports clickable links in the output)
• Automatic cleanup of unused build-caches to save disk space
• Much lower energy usage

The list goes on! Check out the feature comparison between OrbStack and Docker Desktop to see a more complete list.

Kubernetes and Linux

OrbStack also provides the best local Kubernetes story out there.

You get a single-node Kubernetes cluster which has been optimised for development, and because it uses the same container engine as the rest of OrbStack, all your Docker images are immediately available for use in pods, without needing to push to a registry. You also benefit from the other OrbStack features, for example automatic DNS names for your pods and services, no need to mess around with port forwarding. Ingress resources will Just Work™. It’s super slick.

As if all that weren’t enough, OrbStack even allows you to spin up Linux virtual machines, again with a level of polish that really sets it apart from other solutions.

Summary

I’ve been using OrbStack since the early beta, and immediately subscribed when v1.0 was launched back in September last year. In that time, it’s gone from strength to strength, continually adding great new features that really sets it apart from the competition. I love the proper native macOS application, the sheer speed, and all the nice “quality of life” features that make it a joy to use, and recommend you give it a try today.

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