Screenshot tools used to be small and fast. Somewhere along the way they turned into accounts, uploads, subscriptions, and a launch screen. Reticle is a return to the older idea: one hotkey, a crosshair, a few ways to mark something up, and then it gets out of your way. It lives in the menu bar. No Dock icon, no window waiting for you, nothing running in the background but a hotkey. HOW IT WORKS 1. Press Command-Shift-9 from anywhere, or choose Capture Area from the menu bar. 2. The screen dims and a crosshair appears. Drag out the part you want — a live pixel readout follows your cursor, so you can hit an exact size. Esc backs out. 3. Let go, and the region freezes in place with a small markup toolbar beside it. MARK IT UP Draw straight lines, arrows, rectangles, and ellipses. Click anywhere to drop a text label and start typing. Choose from a row of color swatches or open the full macOS color picker, and pick one of three stroke weights — text scales with the weight you choose. Command-Z undoes the last thing you drew. COPY OR SAVE Copy puts the finished image, annotations and all, straight onto the clipboard — ready to paste into a message, a document, or a bug report. Save writes a PNG. Reticle suggests a name, you change it to whatever you want, and the file goes wherever you tell it to. Cancel throws the capture away. Each of those is a button on the toolbar and a keyboard shortcut — Command-C, Command-S, and Esc — so you can use whichever is closer to hand. SHARP ON EVERY DISPLAY Reticle captures at your display's true resolution, so a capture from a Retina screen stays crisp instead of arriving soft and half-size. Multiple monitors are handled properly too, including setups that mix a Retina laptop screen with a non-Retina external display. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO This part is deliberate. Reticle doesn't upload anything, doesn't generate links, doesn't have an account, and doesn't sync. There's no history to manage and no library to fill up. It takes a picture of part of your screen, lets you draw on it, and hands it back to you. PRIVACY Reticle has no network access whatsoever — not restricted, not optional, simply absent from what the app is permitted to do. Your captures never leave your Mac, because nothing in the app is capable of sending them anywhere. Nothing is collected, measured, or reported. Capturing the screen needs macOS's Screen Recording permission, which you grant once. Reticle captures only when you ask it to, at the moment you ask. REQUIREMENTS macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, on a Mac with Apple silicon. FREE Reticle is free and complete. There's no paid tier and nothing held back. If you end up using it every day and want to leave a tip, there's a small optional tip jar tucked into Preferences — it unlocks nothing, and the app never prompts you about it.
Productivity · iPhone, iPad · Free
