Freeze, your way • Freeze always keeps the moment: with Freeze on, the shortcut freezes the screen every time, staging or not, so a web page's tooltip or hover menu is still there to shoot. A frozen shot hides desktop icons if that's on, but skips the rest of staging; live captures are fully staged. • A shortcut for one frozen shot: with Freeze off, ⌘⌃⇧7 freezes the screen for a single capture while the main shortcut stays live. Change it in Settings ▸ Capturing. • Settings, rearranged: Appearance is now Capturing, with the menu bar icon, the shortcuts and Freeze together. The accent color moved to General. • A Small cursor size for recordings, closer to the real pointer. • Back where you started: screen and selection captures and screen recordings return to the app you started them from, so its windows are shot active rather than dimmed. • Hover the zoom track to scrub through a recording, the same way the clip bar does. • Fixes: Settings no longer runs off the bottom of a smaller screen; moving a Capture Selection region no longer makes it grow as you drag it; Hide desktop icons works properly on macOS 27 again.

Freeze the moment, keep the pointer • Freeze the screen: press HotShot's shortcut and the shot is taken that instant, before HotShot's panel appears, so hover states, tooltips and open menus are still there in Screen, Window and Selection captures. It's on by default for new installs, and Settings ▸ Advanced has the switch. The frozen screen stays visible behind the panel, so what you see is what you'll shoot. • Freeze and Delay work together: pick a Delay and the capture counts down and shoots live. • Window capture now lists floating windows — utility panels, inspectors and always-on-top windows. • The pointer is now a layer you can edit. Captures add it where it was; move it, resize it, delete it, or switch it to a pointing hand, text cursor, open or closed hand, or the copy pointer. A new Pointer tool (M) in Markup places one wherever you click. • Color backdrops can be a gradient, for screenshots and recordings alike, with a new color picker for Markup and Compose: hue strip, curated palettes and a hex field. • Caption below title: a new switch in Compose and in recordings stacks the caption right under the title. • Drag a link onto the Web Page window or its address bar to load it. • Prefer blue? Settings ▸ Appearance offers HotShot Pink or Sensible Blue as the accent color. • Translated throughout in all 11 languages, with counts that use each language's own plural forms. • Fixes: the recording indicator no longer shows up in screen recordings; the Web Page address bar shrinks before toolbar buttons are hidden, and chosen viewports show their checkmarks; the permissions screen stays up until you've had a chance to set up Camera and Microphone; ⌘, opens Settings in every language.

A precise crop, and faster exports • A new crop editor for captures, images on the canvas and recordings: click a handle and nudge it a pixel at a time with the arrow keys, with a magnifier to see where the edge lands. Type an exact size, ⌥-drag to resize from the center, and press Return to finish. • Recordings with a pointer, webcam bubble or zoom export up to 1.7× faster, with smaller files when the screen is still. • Capturing from a full-screen app now opens the capture window on your desktop instead of leaving it behind. • Save, Export and Open dialogs slide down from their window instead of floating free.

Back to your captures • While a capture or recording window is open, HotShot is in the Dock and the ⌘-Tab switcher, so you can get back to it from another app. • Paste as many images onto a canvas as you like. Each lands where you're looking, and pasting copied annotations again fans them out instead of stacking them. • Undo takes back a paste, as well as Delete, nudges, Duplicate and stacking changes made from the keyboard. • The Edit menu works on the canvas, and so do Cut, Copy, Paste and Duplicate in the right-click menu.

Select exactly the area you want • Capture Selection keeps the area on screen until you're ready: move it, resize it from any edge or corner, then click Capture, press Return or double-click. • Drag along a recording's clip to scrub through it, the way hovering previews it. • Cut reads Done while it's on, and Reset Clip has moved into the gear menu. • Exported clips are named after the clip, without "(trimmed)". • Images pasted from another document now show in Compose and export, and so does a canvas with annotations alone. • In the Title and Caption fields, Esc discards your edits and ⌘Return keeps them. • Captures from the Safari extension no longer quit HotShot. • Controls take the magenta from HotShot's icon.

Tidier controls • Preset rows line up with their labels, sit a little closer together, and fade at an edge when there's more to scroll. • A selected crosshair's outline now follows its lines instead of boxing the whole image, and drawing one shows how far it reaches.

Easier to use without a mouse • Every styling preset and the window and display pickers are now real buttons — reachable with Tab and read by VoiceOver. • Trim, zoom and scrub from the keyboard: a new Playhead menu in the recording window, with I and O to set the start and end, Z to add a zoom, and the arrow keys to step. • Respects Reduce Motion and Increase Contrast. • Stop now stops every export at once, leaving no half-written file. • Sharing a recording shows its upload progress, and can be stopped mid-upload. • The canvas no longer briefly changes shape while exporting or sharing.

Zoom as far as the moment needs • Each zoom in a recording now has its own level. Click a zoom on the track under the clip for a slider from 1.2× to 3×; older recordings open at the 1.8× they always had. • Deleting a zoom moved into the same popover. • The pointer grows with the zoom, so it stays in proportion to what it's pointing at. • Clicking the zoom track no longer stretches a selected zoom out to the click or to the end. • The Corner presets are now Sharp, Subtle, Soft, Round and Pill, for screenshots and recordings alike. Anything already styled keeps the corners it had.

A gentle ask for a rating HotShot now occasionally asks whether you'd like to leave a rating. It waits until you've sent a good number of finished shots out — copied, linked or exported — asks at most once per version, and never appears while you're capturing or marking one up. If an export has just handed you over to the Finder, the question waits for another time.

A crop you set on a single picture is now kept when the shot leaves HotShot. Cropping from a picture's own toolbar and then copying used to give you the whole picture squashed into the cropped shape; Copy, Copy Link and Export all honour the crop now. Copy also puts a single image on the clipboard instead of two, so pasting no longer drops the shot in twice. And the Crop window opened from a picture's toolbar now matches the one on the main toolbar.

Open a local page: the Browse & Capture window has a new folder button (⇧⌘O) that opens any HTML file on your Mac, ready to capture at your chosen viewport sizes. Local pages also keep their styling now — they used to capture as bare text, with no stylesheet or images. Plus a clearer explanation when a browser extension can't read a local page.

Record system audio — a new switch in the capture panel takes whatever your Mac is playing, from a video to a call to an app's own sound, straight into your recording. It works alongside the microphone, so you can talk over what you're demonstrating.