Glidesmith records your Mac and hands back a polished demo: zooms placed on every click, a cursor that glides, and a clean background. Trim, tweak, export. No video editor.
Free to record and edit No account macOS 13.1+
How it works
The first recording needs no setup. Glidesmith does the editing work you would otherwise do by hand, and leaves every decision it made on the timeline for you to change.
Pick a screen, a window, or an area from the floating bar. A countdown gives you time to get the pointer in place. The bar stays out of the shot.
Your clicks become eased zooms, the cursor path is smoothed, and a background frames the window. Nearby clicks merge so the camera never jitters.
Cut the ends, nudge a zoom, pick a preset. Export runs on the Mac's hardware encoder, up to 4K at 60 fps, straight to a file on your disk.
Features
Every click is logged on the video's own timeline, then turned into an eased zoom toward what you pressed. Clicks that land close together merge into one move. Each zoom is a block you can drag, stretch, retarget, or delete.
Path smoothing and a spring camera remove hand jitter, so the pointer moves with intent and the frame follows it without snapping.
Record a whole display, one window from a live thumbnail picker, or any region you draw.
Record your voice from any microphone, or capture the sound the Mac is playing.
Colour, gradient, or image backgrounds with padding, corner radius, and shadow. The polished look, in one panel.
Each zoom is a block on the timeline. Move it, stretch it, retarget it, or change how far it zooms.
Add titles, logos, and picture-in-picture video on their own lanes, with a chroma key for green-screen clips.
Speed a clip up or slow it down with its audio kept at pitch, and lay music underneath with volume and fades.
MP4 or MOV, H.264 through Apple's VideoToolbox encoder, up to 4K at 60 fps, with presets for 1080p and 720p.
Drag handles or pick a shape: 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 4:5 and 9:16. The export follows the crop.
Inside the app
From the floating recorder bar to the export sheet. Every surface is built so you approve decisions instead of making them from scratch.
Private by construction
Other recorders upload your take to add their AI features, or need an account just to watch a link. Glidesmith has no server to send it to. Capture, editing and export all run on your machine, and you can check that with any network monitor.
No uploads
Your video is written to your disk and nowhere else.
No account
A licence key pasted into Settings. Nothing to sign in to.
No typed text
Shortcuts like ⌘S are recorded for callouts. The letters you type never are.
Your files
Plain .glide documents you can back up, move, and double-click.
| When | Why | Sends |
|---|---|---|
| Activating a key | Licence (Polar) | Key, Mac name, install ID |
| Launch, if licensed | Licence check (Polar) | Key, activation ID |
| Launch | Announcements (glidesmith.com) | App name, version |
| Recording | Upload video | Never |
That is the whole list. No analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no telemetry in the app. Updates are downloaded from this site by you; the app does not update itself yet.
Compared
| Capability |  Glidesmith | Screen Studio | Loom | OBS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auto-zoom from clicks | ||||
| Recordings stay on your Mac | ||||
| Built-in polish editor | ||||
| No subscription | Varies | Free | ||
| On-device AI cutting | Next |
Based on each product's public documentation at the time of writing. "Next" means on our published roadmap, not in the current build.
Roadmap
The AI cutting tools we looked at process your recording on a server. Ours will transcribe and cut on-device, so the promise above still holds. A licence includes these updates as they ship.
Planned work, not shipping features. Order and timing can change.
Transcribe with whisper.cpp on your Mac, then edit the video by deleting words. Silences, filler words and repeated takes are found for you.
Burned-in captions with word highlighting, or an .srt file beside the video. Generated locally.
A grid of every take: rename, delete, reveal in Finder, reopen in the editor.
A camera bubble, blur masks for sensitive data, and MacBook or iPhone bezels.
FAQ
Everything you need to know about Glidesmith.
Still have questions?Contact us and we reply within 24 hours on business days.Glidesmith is a native macOS screen recorder for product demos and tutorials. You record, and it hands back a polished video with zooms already placed on your clicks, a smoothed cursor, and a background behind the window. Trim, tweak, and export without opening a video editor.
Recording, editing, and previewing are free with no limit. Free exports carry a small "Made with Glidesmith" mark in the corner and stop at the first 2 minutes. A one-time licence, from $29, removes both for good on the Macs it covers. There is no subscription.
No. Capture, editing, and export all run on your Mac. There is no account and no cloud processing. The app goes online for two things only: activating and checking a licence key with Polar, our payment provider, and fetching in-app announcements from glidesmith.com. You can verify that with a network monitor such as Little Snitch.
No. For on-screen shortcut callouts it records keyboard shortcuts made with Command, Control or Option (such as ⌘S), and keys that type nothing, such as Return, Tab, arrows and function keys. It never records a letter, number or symbol on its own, or with only Shift held. The event log cannot reconstruct typed text, including passwords typed on camera. This is enforced in the app and covered by a test that is never skipped.
While you record, Glidesmith logs where you click on the same timeline as the video. It then plans eased zooms toward those clicks, merges clicks that land close together into a single zoom, and moves the camera with a spring so it never snaps. Every zoom is a block on the timeline you can move, resize, retarget, or delete.
macOS Ventura 13.1 and later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel. Capture uses ScreenCaptureKit and export uses Apple's hardware encoder through VideoToolbox, so it runs natively on either chip.
MP4 or MOV with H.264, up to 4K at 60 fps, through the Mac's hardware encoder. Export presets cover 4K60, 1080p60, 1080p30 and 720p, plus crop shapes for 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 4:5 and 9:16. GIF export with a size estimate is in progress.
Screen Recording, so it can capture your screen, and Accessibility, so it can see where you click. Microphone access is asked for only if you record your voice. Glidesmith explains each one before macOS asks.
Loom is built around hosted share links and accounts. Glidesmith has neither: you get a file on your Mac. Compared with other local recorders, the focus is a lower one-time price and, next, AI cutting that runs entirely on your machine instead of on a server.
You choose at checkout: 1, 3, 5 or 10 Macs, from $29 for one. Each licence is a key you paste into Settings, and you can deactivate a Mac from the customer portal to move the key to a new one.
Use the contact page. We read every message and reply within 24 hours on business days, whether it is a bug report, a feature request, or a licence question.
Download Glidesmith, press ⌘⇧R, and see what your clicks turn into. Free to record and edit, no account.
macOS 13.1+ · Apple Silicon & Intel · One-time licence for clean exports
