Flick

Overview

Flick is a macOS utility for recording polished product demos and GIFs. It captures screen regions, smooths cursor paths, and exports lightweight MP4 or GIF files ready for docs and landing pages.

Why I built it

Every demo recording tool either bakes in clunky cursor effects or exports bloated files. I wanted something scriptable and fast that I could use as part of a CI-adjacent workflow.

Technical highlights

• –Native Swift app using ScreenCaptureKit for low-latency frame capture
• –Cursor path smoothing via bezier interpolation between recorded keyframes
• –Export pipeline with configurable codec, resolution, and framerate
• –Scriptable via a simple JSON config for automating demo sequences

Hardest engineering problem

ScreenCaptureKit's frame timing is not perfectly consistent, so cursor position playback required resampling the recorded path to match the actual frame timestamps.

What I learned

macOS capture APIs have excellent performance headroom but require careful permissioning and entitlement handling for App Store versus direct distribution.

Stack

Links