Drape
one shortcut before you share your screen
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Drape - one shortcut before you share your screen

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One shortcut, pressed a few seconds before you share your screen. The apps you pick are hidden, notification banners are covered, desktop icons cleared. Try to open a hidden app and it won't open at all — you get a cover and a 3-minute snooze instead. Press again and everything comes back exactly as it was. What's different: no Accessibility permission, and no claim to detect screen sharing — macOS has no API for that, so you press the shortcut yourself. Free and open source.

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I was in the middle of a client demo, screen shared, when a chat notification slid into the corner. It was nothing important. But everyone on the call had time to read it, and I just kept talking like I hadn't seen it. After that I had a ritual before every screen share: close 1Password, close WhatsApp, check what tabs are open, mute notifications. Every time. And I'd still miss something. So I built Drape. One shortcut does the whole ritual, and one shortcut undoes it. Two things I didn't expect while building it. The hard part isn't hiding apps — it's putting them back. If the app crashes while protection is on, your apps just stay hidden and nothing is left to restore them. That's a far worse failure than not hiding them in the first place. So the active protections get written to disk first, and the next launch cleans up after a process that died. The other one: macOS has no API that tells an app a screen capture just began. I looked hard for one. So Drape doesn't detect it — you press the shortcut. A few tools in this space claim otherwise, and I'd rather write the limitation into the README than have you stop watching for yourself. It's free, MIT, macOS 14+. No Accessibility permission, which ruled out the nicer APIs but means it does something useful the second you install it. One thing I'd genuinely like help with: the default list of sensitive apps. On first launch it ticks the ones you already have — password managers, messaging clients, mail. What's missing from that list?