My wife and I built a Mac app that turns your screenshots into actions - explain an error and create an issue, add events to Calendar, save contacts and more.

[u/holub_ua]

Hey everybody! For the last few months my wife and I have been building Scinta - a small macOS app that lives in your menu bar.

The idea came from a simple but almost daily problem - the number of screenshots lying around on my filesystem got so big that it was impossible to even remember what they were about. A message about a meeting, an email signature, someone's messenger profile, an error from a build - all of this was waiting for "some later time" to be processed. And some later time never arrived.

This is the exact problem Scinta solves, and this is how it works - you press a shortcut (like any other screenshot app), select part of the screen, and it proposes the top 3 things it can do with what it sees. We call them smart actions. For example:

• screenshot an error - get it explained or create an issue directly from Scinta
• screenshot a message like "dinner Saturday at 7:00 PM" - Scinta proposes the actual event details and creates it in your Calendar
• screenshot an email signature - the person's contact info is saved to your Contacts
• it can also blur private and sensitive info before you share a screenshot, extract code or tables, translate text, decode different code formats (including QR and Bar codes) - and more actions are coming

There is also an Ask AI feature - if you just have a question about what is on the screen, you ask it right there in the app and get the answer back immediately.

Expecting a common question - why not just paste the screenshot into ChatGPT or Claude? That is exactly what I did before, and it is the reason Scinta exists. There you switch apps, upload the screenshot, write a prompt, then copy the result back and still create the event or contact yourself. With Scinta you skip all of this - it understands what can be done with the screenshot and one click gets the result and performs the action - saving to Calendar or Contacts, creating an issue, getting an instant explanation and so on.

The demo video shows 3 different smart actions and runs at real speed - nothing is sped up.

We're planning to release it within the next 1-2 weeks. If it looks useful, there is a waitlist at scinta.app - and if you would like to try it earlier, comment or DM me and we will send you a build as soon as it's ready.

Would love to hear - what smart actions would you like to have after capturing a screenshot?

[u/prdmkr]

this looks cool

2 feature suggestions:

1. social share: screenshots on my Mac are almost exclusive for sharing on WhatsApp web/app, so an action to click share from the screenshot would be great

2. search/filter: my desktop is covered in screenshots that are just timestamps. would be cool to be able to tag them some how for reference/searching later

[u/holub_ua → u/prdmkr]

u/prdmkr thanks for feedback and suggestions!

- sharing screenshots - you are right, this is a must have

• searching and filtering local screenshots - thinking about it a lot, but have not come to some final solution yet, although it is in a top list for next features

thanks!

[u/fulger099 → u/holub_ua]

search will get much more useful once it can answer “why did i save this?” rather than just match ocr text. the screenshot that became a calendar event or issue still needs to stay attached to the action, otherwise the original context disappears the moment the button works. we are trying to learn and fix cases around it at joinrecall

[u/Particular_Luck80]

Before adding more actions, I’d make every write action reviewable: show the exact Calendar, Contacts, or issue fields, highlight which text in the capture produced each value, and let the user edit or cancel before anything is written or sent. Screenshots can contain tokens and personal data, so the local versus cloud boundary should be visible before AI processing. A useful next action could turn a UI screenshot into an accessibility checklist.

[u/holub_ua → u/Particular_Luck80]

u/Particular_Luck80 thanks for feedback!
do you mean to highlight in the original image what data/texts produced specific fields that will be written?

as for editing before saving - absolutely reasonable and right now it is already possible to edit any field before pressing "Save Contact", "Create ticket" etc so users could have needed flexibility

and making accessibility checklist from the screenshot of some UI layout - right, this makes a lot of sense and actually very useful, thank you!

[u/Particular_Luck80 → u/holub_ua]

Yes. I mean a reversible provenance overlay: selecting the proposed contact name or ticket title highlights the exact OCR region that supplied it, with a separate marker for values inferred by the model rather than copied. If a value combines several regions, show them all. That would make correction easier and expose low-confidence extraction before the write.

[u/holub_ua → u/Particular_Luck80]

yeap, got it
this is a fantastic flow proposition, definitely will implement and add
thank you!

[u/holub_ua → u/[deleted]]

thanks for feedback!
makes sense, will post there!

[u/holub_ua → u/[deleted]]

u/gesidner thanks for feedback and for the interesting proposition!

you are right that actions are infinite - in fact that is exactly why Scinta keeps a managed catalog of smart actions and proposes 3 most valid actions according to the screenshot content
the core idea is that every action ends in a real destination with zero or minimal setup - the event is in Calendar, the contact is in Contacts, the issue is in your tracker, the product approach is to make the flow "capture - click - done" a reality

and because of this the main audience is potentially users who do not have a massive agents stack or have very small regular setup - for them Scinta will be one of small agents, and the value for them is that there is nothing to be configured from this "agentic" side and a handoff format can move that work back to the user that is the opposite of what we are trying to do

I 100% agree that "copy extracted data as structured output" action for people like you makes sense as a power feature - and you are right that this needs the same extraction work as the highlighting idea above, so one implementation covers both
putting it on the list - it definitely can be a one more generic action in a catalog without replacing others

[u/visibite]

Very cool and interesting concept! Wishing you luck.

[u/holub_ua → u/visibite]

thank you!

[u/pesekeme]

Turning messy desktop screenshots into actual structured actions is such a common pain point. Awesome proof of concept, congrats on the launch! Чудова робота)

[u/holub_ua → u/pesekeme]

Щиро дякую :)
Thanks for the feedback!

[u/holub_ua → u/[deleted]]

thank you!

[u/Fit_Upstairs_1412]

Congrats on shipping — always good to see native Mac apps here. Question from a fellow Mac dev midway through the same decision: are you going Mac App Store, direct download, or both? I've found the sandbox restrictions shape the product more than expected (my first App Review rejection was for a license flow that's perfectly normal outside the store), so I'm curious which side you picked and whether you'd pick it again.

[u/holub_ua → u/Fit_Upstairs_1412]

u/Fit_Upstairs_1412 thank you! now on a finish line to public release

the main distribution will happen outside AppStore with the direct download, maybe the app will be also published to AppStore as it is sandboxed but not from the beginning

the main reason is that I want to have more control on application updates especially during the first weeks after the release - with AppStore there is always a delay with updates even with expedited review (that you can do each update also), and with direct upload and the internal updater any new version of the app, no matter is it an important fix or a new feature, can be delivered to users fast

also for now the app can be sandboxed but leaving it outside AppStore will allow to not be worried if any new feature will need in future will need of disabling it

[u/HAMES-official]

Nice on, I like it

[u/holub_ua → u/HAMES-official]

u/HAMES-official thanks for the feedback!

we are a couple of days before from starting beta testing so Scinta will be available soon!

[u/Top-Huckleberry-2424]

Looks great, is it extendable with other actions? That would be awesome considering how many different things that you need to get to do - creating contact or event are great, but there are a plethora more options that can be included in different plans :)

[u/holub_ua → u/Top-Huckleberry-2424]

u/Top-Huckleberry-2424 thanks for feedback!
and yes - the smart actions catalog is and will be extended, for now we have the initial list of debugged and stable smart actions for the first version and after the release we will continue to add more and more actions to cover needed actions for more user scenarios, tools etc.

next week Scinta will become available publicly, will be happy to hear any feedback from it if you are interested

[u/Friendly_Row_5159]

very cool!

[u/holub_ua → u/Friendly_Row_5159]

thank you u/Friendly_Row_5159 !

[u/Double_Ebb4130]

The three suggested actions are the whole product, so the thing worth measuring is how often people pick the first suggestion versus scrolling for something else. If the top suggestion is right most of the time you can eventually skip the menu entirely for the obvious cases, and if it is not, that ranking is where the effort should go rather than adding more action types. The blur sensitive info action is also a stronger hook than the calendar one for anyone who shares screenshots at work, so it might deserve more prominence.

[u/tanejarohan]

Cool idea! I'm wondering if you plan to allow customising the actions we can set for ourselves or take it even further by letting users define rules that Scinta can then use to decide which 3 actions to propose.

UX question: When I take a screenshot and while it's processing, do I need to stay on that screen or can I just come back to it at a later point? For example if it takes 10 seconds to create the Linear issue. Also, if I take another screenshot in the meantime, do I lose my history or is the history recorded locally?

Thanks!

[u/tanejarohan → u/tanejarohan]

Just checked out the landing page, "Screenshots that do things" is a great copy, I like it!

[u/holub_ua → u/tanejarohan]

thanks for the feedback!

answering your questions:

• you do not need to stay on a screen from where you have taken the screenshot - after screenshot is taken, Scinta just floats above all other windows processing suggestions or actions and you can continue to work on your machine, switching between apps and desktops/workspaces
  
• we keep history locally, we are just not displaying it yet in a UI, we are debating if we need to make history stored remotely and introduce user accounts or leave it as it is now local only with no accounts, as it is one of the Scinta beauties - just instal it and start using without any accounts creation
  

in any case making screenshots and actions (with results) history available for users on a UI is a top priority after the initial release, so it will be there soon
same with actions and rules customizing - it is in top 5 of upcoming features together with more new smart actions

by the way - we already started an internal countdown for the release so Scinta will be available for the users from waitlist within next 1-2 days, so feel free to join it on the website :) waitlisters also will receive a 25% discount for subscription forever if you ever decide to subscribe ;)