Sel

Sel is a macOS app for composing what you share on screen before you ever hit share in a meeting. Instead of broadcasting your whole desktop with its clutter, notifications, and stray tabs, you pick specific windows and arrange them on a clean canvas. What the room sees is the curated version you built, not everything happening on your machine. It solves the small dread most people feel right before sharing their screen, the worry that a private message or an embarrassing tab is one glance away from an audience.

The organizing idea is scenes. A scene is a saved layout of the windows you've chosen, and you can set up several of them ahead of time, then switch between them with a single click during a call. When you jump from one scene to another, an animated transition plays on the shared output while your webcam feed and overlays stay put, so the handoff looks intentional rather than jarring. That turns a screen share into something closer to a lightweight broadcast, where you cut between prepared views the way a presenter would rather than dragging windows around live while everyone watches.

On top of the layout, Sel adds a live toolkit for the moment you're actually presenting. There are drawing tools, a pen, highlighter, arrows, shapes, and text, for annotating whatever is on screen in real time. Zoom to cursor magnifies the area around your pointer so fine detail is readable without anyone squinting at a shared 4K display. You can drop in overlays like images, GIFs, and text blocks, crop or resize the windows you're sharing so only the relevant part shows, and turn on a keystroke display that surfaces the keys you press while quietly leaving passwords out of the readout.

The webcam handling is built for presenters too. Your camera sits as a movable overlay with optional background blur, so you stay visible without a distracting room behind you, and it holds its position even as scenes change underneath it. Live captions run on-device, transcribing what you say as you go, which helps both accessibility and anyone joining from a noisy environment where audio drops out. For demos on a bigger setup, there's full-screen canvas support on a second display, so your composed output can live on an external monitor while you keep your controls on the laptop.

It also records. Whatever you compose can be saved as a video or captured as snapshots, so the same setup you use for a live call doubles as a way to produce a clean tutorial, a product walkthrough, or a quick async update. That overlap is part of the appeal, since the effort you put into arranging windows and overlays pays off whether the audience is watching live or catching it later. A layout you built for a standup can be reused to record the same demo for people who missed it, and snapshots are handy for grabbing one clean frame of a diagram without the clutter of the desktop around it.

Sel fits anyone who presents from a Mac and wants more control than the built-in share button gives, from people running product demos and sales calls to teachers, streamers, and folks recording tutorials. What makes it stand apart is that it treats screen sharing as something you direct rather than something that just happens. The scene-switching, the annotation layer, and the stable webcam turn a raw desktop into a composed feed, and it does all of that locally on your machine rather than routing your screen through a cloud service.

That local-first design is also the privacy story. Sel states that it collects no data and that everything stays stored on your device, which is a meaningful stance for a tool that by nature sits on top of whatever sensitive thing you're working on. The on-device captions are part of the same posture, transcribing your speech without shipping the audio off somewhere. For anyone who has to demo internal software or discuss confidential material, a composition tool that keeps its hands off your content matters more than a longer feature list would. It's often the difference between a utility you can use on a client call and one a security team quietly bans.

On availability and price, Sel keeps things simple. It's a native app on the Mac App Store, requires macOS 15 or later, and follows a freemium model where it's free to try with premium features unlocked through an in-app purchase rather than a subscription page on a website. If you share your screen often and want it to look deliberate instead of accidental, this is the kind of utility that earns its place on the dock quickly.