Why I made it

Reading from notes on a call or a recording gives you away through your eyes. They drop to the notes, slide across, come back up, and the people watching can tell you're reading. A real teleprompter fixes that with a pane of glass in front of the lens, but that's a whole rig, and on a laptop the camera is already at the top of the screen. So the notes should be there too, right under the lens.

There are Mac apps that do this, and some of them are good. I wanted my own, for three reasons:

• It should follow the words, not just the sound. Scrolling while you talk is a good start, but it doesn't know where you are. If you stop to answer a question, go off script for a minute or skip a paragraph, a voice-activated scroll drifts. Follow mode listens for the script's own words, so it moves on when you've actually said the line, and it catches up when you skip ahead.
• Nobody else should see it. If the notes show up in the screen share, they're not your notes anymore.
• It should be mine. Plain text files I can open anywhere, no account, nothing in the cloud, and code I can change when I want it to do something else.

Basically, it's a notes app that lives under the camera.

What I left out on purpose

• A phone remote. The shortcuts and Follow cover it, and a phone on the desk is one more thing to look at.
• Recording. macOS already records the screen and the camera well (QuickTime Player, or ⇧⌘5), and the prompter is left out of what they capture.
• Rich text. Bold and colours in a script give you something to read, not something to say. Cues and notes cover what a script needs.