{"slug": "screenform-circle-anything-on-your-screen-get-an-ai-answer", "title": "ScreenForm – circle anything on your screen, get an AI answer", "summary": "ScreenForm, a new macOS utility for Apple silicon and Intel Macs running macOS 14 or later, lets users circle anything on screen with a keyboard shortcut and receive an AI-generated answer in place, with on-device OCR and context gathering, and offers 15 free actions per month with no card or subscription. The app can also research topics into Apple Pages documents, write into files in editors like VS Code or Cursor, and extract tables and charts into editable formats, while clearly marking uncertain data.", "body_md": "macOS 14+ · Apple silicon & Intel\n\n# Your screen is\n\nnot a picture.\n\nHold ⌃⌘ and circle anything on screen. ScreenForm reads your selection *and what surrounds it*, then answers in place, researches it into a Pages document, writes it into a file in your editor, or animates it into a live preview.\n\nFree. 15 actions a month, no card, no subscription.\n\nDrag anywhere here to draw one\n\nGesture\n\n## Three moves, and you never leave the app.\n\nNo screenshot, no crop, no pasting context into a chat window. The answer comes to where you already are.\n\n*+*⌘\n\n### Overlay on\n\nHold both keys for a beat and a translucent layer drops over every display. The short delay is why ordinary chords like ⌃⌘F never set it off.\n\n### Region captured\n\nLasso a chart, an error, a table, a paragraph. Release and the loop closes, everything outside dims, and the edge starts marching.\n\n### Answer in place\n\nPick an action or type your own, then hit Return. Hold ⌃⌘ again to start a fresh selection without closing this one. Esc dismisses everything.\n\nInput\n\n## The circle is a pointer, not the input.\n\nAnything can read pixels. What makes an answer useful is knowing where those pixels came from. So the moment you start drawing, ScreenForm is already gathering the situation around your selection, in parallel and on your Mac, and you never have to explain any of it.\n\n**Safari** READ\n\n**on-device OCR** READ\n\n**URL + element** READ\n\n**VS Code, Cursor** READ\n\n### This is what makes it useful\n\nCircle a diagram in an article and ask what it means. The pixels are four boxes and some arrows. The page is what says the subject is home heating, so the loop is running in reverse. The answer is only good because of the second half.\n\n### Gathered in parallel, and free\n\nEvery source is collected at once while you're still typing, so the extra context costs you nothing in wait time. Any source that fails is dropped in silence rather than blocking the answer.\n\n### Nothing leaves except the question\n\nOCR and context gathering run entirely on your Mac. Only the assembled question and the region you circled make a network call, and follow-ups keep the whole thread, so \"so is it cheaper than a boiler?\" just works.\n\nOutput\n\n## Pixels in. Data out.\n\nEvery selection gets classified first, with a confidence and a reason, so you can see it understood a table as a table. When it finds a table or a chart, Make editable pulls it out of the pixels into a live editor you can type into and export.\n\n| Region | Q3 | Q4 | Δ |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| Americas | $1.24M | $1.61M | +29% |\n| EMEA | $880K | $1.02M | +16% |\n| APAC | $610K | $79?K | +3_% |\n\n**Detected: Table** · 98% · four aligned columns with a header row\n\nWhat changed between the quarters?\n\nAmericas grew fastest at `+29%`\n\n, and every region was up on Q3.\n\n12 of 15 remaining\n\nAfter Make editable\n\n| Region | Q3 | Q4 | Δ |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| Americas | $1.24M | $1.61M | +29% |\n| EMEA | $880K | $1.02M | +16% |\n| APAC | $610K | unreadable | unreadable |\n\n+ Add rowEdit any cell. Values redraw as you type.\n\n**It never invents data.** A cell the extractor couldn't read comes back empty and renders as an amber placeholder, never as a plausible guess. Chart values it had to infer from bar height, rather than read off a label, are marked approximate. Anywhere you see this color, in the app or on this page, it means the same thing: ScreenForm isn't sure, and it's saying so.\n\nArtifacts\n\n## It doesn't stop at an answer.\n\nSome questions want a sentence back. Others want a document, a working file, or something you can actually watch run. ScreenForm builds all three, from the same circle, and hands each one to the app that should own it.\n\n\"research this\"\n\nHeat Pumps in Residential Retrofit\n\nAbstract\n\n1 · Coefficient of performance\n\nSources\n\n1. iea.org 2. nrel.gov 3. energy.gov\n\n### Research, into Pages\n\nIt searches your topic and several around it, writes a structured paper with an abstract, sections and cited sources, then opens it in Apple Pages ready to edit.\n\n\"write me the script\"\n\n### Files, into your editor\n\nAsk for a script, a component, or an SVG. It writes the file into **~/ScreenForm** and opens it in VS Code, Cursor, Sublime, or whatever you use by default.\n\n\"animate how this works\"\n\n### Previews you can run\n\nAsk it to visualize or animate what you circled and it builds a working HTML and SVG preview. One button opens it full size in its own window, or in your browser.\n\n**It writes files. It never runs them.** Everything it generates lands in one folder you can see, **~/ScreenForm**, and opens in your own editor. Nothing is executed for you, so you always read the code before it does anything.\n\nCapabilities\n\n## What it does once it has read.\n\nNot a chat window you paste into. An action layer that sits over whatever you're already doing.\n\n### Answers stream in place\n\nResponses render token by token in a panel beside your selection, formatted the way you would write them: headings, lists, tables, and inline code.\n\n### Actions before you type\n\nA capture opens with one-tap actions already offered, so the common moves cost you nothing. Once an answer lands, Claude attaches up to five more that fit it: open a link, copy a command, run a search, or ask the obvious follow-up.\n\n### Live web search, with sources\n\nWhen an answer needs something current, the model searches on its own and streams the citations back. Circle a ticker and it identifies the symbol, leads with the live price and day change, and links the finance page.\n\n__apple.com__· current M4 pricing\n\n__nasdaq.com__· quote as of 9:41\n\n### Lives in the menu bar\n\nOne icon, no Dock presence, no window to manage. The overlay and the panel are both non-activating, so the app you were in stays frontmost the whole time.\n\n__Setup, Text Size, Reduce Motion, Quit__\n\n### Sized and scaled to you\n\nDrag any edge of the panel to resize it, and it remembers. ⌘+ and ⌘− scale every word in it from 80% to 200%, and Reduce Motion calms the animation.\n\n__320×160 up to 900×1000__\n\n### It picks the model for you\n\nQuick questions stay instant on a fast model. Research, extraction, and anything creative route to a heavier one on their own, so you get speed by default and quality when the task has earned it.\n\n__Claude Haiku 4.5__\n\n__Claude Opus 4.8__\n\nBoundaries\n\n## It only looks when you draw.\n\nCapture is meant to be impossible to miss: the overlay, the dimming, the moving stroke. If you don't see all three, it isn't happening.\n\n### Capture is deliberate\n\nThe screen is read only when you hold the shortcut and draw. Never on a timer, never in the background, and never of itself: ScreenForm's own windows are excluded from every capture.\n\n### Local by default\n\nOCR and context gathering never leave your Mac. Captures live in a per-session temp folder and are deleted when the session closes.\n\n### Keys stay on your Mac\n\nFree requests go through our proxy, so no provider key ships inside the app. Your own key lives in the macOS Keychain.\n\nNo microphone. No camera. Screen Recording is the only permission it needs. It reads no files of yours, and the only place it writes is the **~/ScreenForm** folder, when you ask it for one. Accessibility is optional, used for nothing but window titles, and never force-prompted. Each browser asks for Automation the first time you circle something in it.\n\nCost\n\n## No subscription. Ever.\n\nOne action is one answered question, and the panel shows what's left of your fifteen every time you use it. Bring your own key the day that stops being enough.\n\n*/ forever*\n\nFifteen actions a month. Sign in with Google, no card.\n\n**15 actions** every month- Every feature, nothing gated\n- No card, no trial countdown\n- Count shown live,\n**no surprise cutoff**\n\n[Download free](#download)\n\n*/ unlimited*\n\nAdd an Anthropic key and pay Anthropic directly for exactly what you use.\n\n**Unlimited** actions- Stored in the\n**macOS Keychain** - Never leaves your machine\n- Requests go\n**straight to Anthropic**\n\n[Add your key](#download)\n\n## Stop screenshotting\n\nyour own screen.\n\nHold ⌃⌘. Draw a circle. Ask.\n\n[Download for Mac](ScreenForm.dmg)macOS 14+ · Apple silicon & Intel · Free, no card", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/screenform-circle-anything-on-your-screen-get-an-ai-answer", "canonical_source": "https://screenform.app", "published_at": "2026-08-16 20:35:21+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-16 21:11:07.411365+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "artificial-intelligence", "computer-vision", "natural-language-processing"], "entities": ["ScreenForm", "Apple", "Safari", "VS Code", "Cursor", "Apple Pages"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/screenform-circle-anything-on-your-screen-get-an-ai-answer", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/screenform-circle-anything-on-your-screen-get-an-ai-answer.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/screenform-circle-anything-on-your-screen-get-an-ai-answer.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/screenform-circle-anything-on-your-screen-get-an-ai-answer.jsonld"}}