michaelshimeles/glide

Glide is worth a look if you make product demos on a Mac and have been paying for, or working around, Screen Studio–style edits. It is a young, single-platform project, so treat it as something to evaluate against your footage and your Mac version, not as a finished replacement.

The problem

Recording a demo used to mean capturing the screen, then manually adding zoom keyframes, redrawing the cursor, framing the window and encoding the result for sharing. Each of those steps lives in a different tool, and the zoom pass is usually the tedious one. Glide records the screen, a window, a dragged area or a USB iPhone into a project package, logs clicks and gestures, and turns those clicks into automatic spring-physics zooms. When you stop, the recording opens in the editor, where the result is previewed live and exported as MP4 or GIF.

What's different

The distinguishing mechanism is separating a deterministic engine from rendering. The src/engine module models every frame — spring animation, time mapping, cursor, camera, captions, masks — as pure, tested state, while a wgpu/Metal compositor draws that state with a single shader. In practice this means zoom and cursor effects are re-derived from recorded input rather than baked into the capture, and the preview and the export share the same model. Export goes GPU to VideoToolbox with no copy through system memory, and the README claims this is usually several times faster than real time.

The author is explicit that behaviour was reverse engineered from Screen Studio using REA and Claude Code, and that no Screen Studio code or assets are included — wallpapers, cursors, device frames and click sounds are generated by Glide's own code. That matters for how you read the feature parity claims: they are the author's stated target, not an independent comparison. Captions run locally through whisper.cpp or Apple Speech, with models downloaded on first use, and a voice-isolation option runs on-device. The trade-off is scope: this is one team's push toward parity on one platform, so the extensive feature list should be checked against your own editing needs rather than assumed complete.

Who should try it

A good fit is a Mac-based developer or designer producing short product walkthroughs who wants auto-zoom, a polished cursor and a framed background without a subscription editor, and who is comfortable building from source. It serves that case particularly well because the CLI can record and re-export projects scriptably, and synthetic demo projects can be generated without screen-recording permissions. A poor fit is anyone on Linux or Windows, anyone who needs a signed prebuilt download from a trusted channel, or anyone who requires a stable editor before adopting it. A bundled signed app is built by scripts/release-macos.sh, but the README's primary path is a local build with your own toolchain; there is an update feed through Sparkle for installed copies, but building and notarizing are your responsibility if you produce your own release.

Requirements and limitations

macOS 15 is required to build, while the universal release build targets macOS 14 and later — check both if you share projects or build for other machines. The build needs Rust (2024 edition), Xcode and CMake, the latter only for whisper.cpp captions, plus an SDKROOT adjustment for plain cargo build when CMake's compiler check trips on the tapi error. Release packaging requires a Developer ID certificate and notarization credentials, so distributing a build is a separate setup burden from running one. Ongoing care includes the daily Sparkle update check for installed copies and the first-use Whisper model download for captions.

HotRepo's take

HotRepo's only recorded observation is #24 on the NEW-REPOSITORY board for Rust, with 260 total stars on 2026-10-27 — not an overall Trending rank and not a daily growth figure. With a single recorded date, trend persistence cannot be judged; the 14-day age supports calling it young, nothing more. Before spending an afternoon on the build, check the PERFORMANCE.md measurements for recording overhead and export speed against the footage you actually plan to produce.

Project source and documentation