Annotate

About

Annotate is a lightweight, keyboard-driven screen annotation tool for macOS that lets you quickly draw, highlight, and annotate anything on your screen. It is aimed at presentations, live demos, and teaching sessions, where visual markup helps explain concepts and sharpen clarity.

The app offers a range of drawing tools, including a pen, arrow, line, highlighter, rectangle, circle, counter, text annotations, and redact rectangles that hide confidential content with a solid, pixelated, or blurred fill. Annotations can either fade out after a set duration or persist on screen in Always-On mode. Other features include a quick color picker, a quick size picker, a whiteboard or blackboard mode that follows the system appearance, a cursor highlight for presentations, and a floating toolbar that can be toggled with a keyboard shortcut. Annotate works over fullscreen applications, provides menu bar integration, and supports customizable keyboard shortcuts and a global hotkey.

Annotate requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later and supports both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. It can be installed from a DMG or ZIP download or via Homebrew Cask, and can also be built from source in Xcode. The app is code-signed and notarized, and includes automatic update checking.