A tool that grew out of daily delivery work
Simple Shot was never meant to be a mass-market toy. It started as a working instrument — for me and for the same kind of “gurus” on delivery projects: developers, QA engineers, people who constantly capture bugs, flows, and UI state for the customer.
The workflow is familiar: select a screen region, annotate with an arrow or text, blur sensitive data when needed, save a PNG or instantly share a link after upload. No heavy editor, and no mandatory third-party cloud account if your own SFTP/S3/API is enough.
From personal convenience to an open-source product
It became clear that the need was not unique. This tool is useful not only to me and a narrow circle of geeks. Many people who talk to business through screenshots every day — QA, support, analysts, team leads — still lack a sharp, self-hosted path. That is when the decision was made: take Simple Shot to a wider audience — a public repository, MIT license, distributable builds, and clear documentation.
The project lives on GitHub: multi-monitor capture, annotations, watermarks, link history, upload profiles (SSH/SFTP, FTP/FTPS, Amazon S3, HTTP API with an API key), an encrypted secrets vault, and ten UI languages. Technically it is Electron + TypeScript as a tray app for Windows / macOS / Linux.
Who finds it “too much” — and who finds a breakthrough
Positioning should be honest. For a casual user who crops a meme once a month, Simple Shot can feel oversized: upload profiles, a vault, watermark, blur, aspect-ratio crop — that is a professional contour.
For programmers, testers, and everyone delivering for customers, the picture is different. After the AI wave in coding, a huge layer of visual communication with stakeholders remains: a marked bug, “as it looks now”, proof after a fix. Fast capture → annotation → link in chat is daily team hygiene. In that segment Simple Shot feels like a practical discovery of the year after AI: the model writes code, and you still have to show the result to a human. A contextual screenshot remains a currency of trust.
What is already solid — and what still needs work
Platform maturity is asymmetric, and that should be stated openly:
- Windows is the primary production track. Roughly four versions have already shipped (including an NSIS installer and a portable build via electron-builder). Most UX, upload, and tray-stability iterations landed here.
- Linux still needs more polish: desktop environments, screen-capture permissions, packaging and install UX differ from Windows more than “same Electron” suggests.
- Apple (macOS) is a separate front: Screen Recording permissions, notarization/signing, menu and tray behavior. The codebase is shared, but the macOS build still has to reach full product quality.
The strategy is deliberate: harden Windows as the mature channel for daily users first, then close Linux and macOS gaps — without pretending “perfect everywhere” on day one.
Product principles I keep
- Optimize the “noticed → showed” loop before cosmetics.
- Treat secrets and upload profiles as first-class features, not afterthoughts.
- Stay open source (MIT): code and process are visible; contributions are welcome.
- Publish an honest platform roadmap instead of a false “full cross-platform day one” claim.
Takeaway
Simple Shot began as a tool for strong engineers and QA, then became a public product because the pain turned out to be shared. For casual users it may be “too powerful”; for people who deliver to customers every day it is exactly the productivity layer AI does not replace. Windows has already gone through several releases; Linux and macOS are the next maturity step. The repository is open: github.com/prybytkow/simple-shot.