GlassCue is a macOS-native teleprompter for solo creators who record themselves on camera. The script floats above every app in a non-activating glass pane — so QuickTime stays foreground, OBS keeps capturing, and your keyboard still talks to whichever app you were just in. The teleprompter is just there.
The thesis
Three things GlassCue refuses to compromise on. Lose any one of them and it stops being GlassCue.
It's a borderless, non-activating NSPanel — AppKit, not SwiftUI window — floating above every space. Your recording app stays foreground. Your typing keeps going to the app you were just in. The teleprompter is just… there.
Play, pause, speed, jump-back, retake marks, paste-as-script — every CueAction is reachable from a configurable global shortcut. The keyboard is the entire control surface; the menu bar is the optional one.
Calm Mode, focus-region dimming, frame-synced scrolling via CADisplayLink, undo/redo on your position. The prompter shouldn't add nerves to the take — it should subtract them.
Three scroll modes · one prompter
Most prompters scroll one way and ask you to live with it. GlassCue ships three modes that share the same parsed script and switch with a single hotkey — because the same person reads differently when the take is going well than when it isn't.
CADisplayLink-driven scrolling synced to your display's refresh. Speed Up / Speed Down nudge by 10 WPM; tap-to-reset returns you to your profile default. The mode you live in on a normal take.
SFSpeechRecognizer on-device, Levenshtein fuzzy match against the next sentence. Stumble on a word, jump back a take, skip a line on the fly — the prompter just keeps up. Microphone permission required; no audio leaves your Mac.
Scroll wheel events route directly into the prompter (the pane never takes focus, so your trackpad still works in whatever app is foreground). PageUp / PageDown step section to section — the same keys every Logitech and Kensington remote already sends.
Every mode shares the same ParsedScript. Switch modes mid-take; the prompter doesn't reset your position.
The keyboard is the entire control surface
GlassCue's whole control philosophy is one principle: the menu bar is optional, the keyboard is canonical. Defaults are sane. Conflict detection is built into the rebind UI. Hold ⌘ on the pane and the entire shortcut map fades in over the script — discoverability without a tutorial.
From inside QuickTime, Zoom, Final Cut, or anywhere else, GlassCue listens for the ⌘⇧ family — so your editor's own ⌘Z, ⌘S, and ⌘Space keep doing what they always did. Bring the pane into focus with a click and you get the bare keys: Space, ↑, ↓, R. The keyboard model adapts to where you are.
Hold ⌘ over the pane to fade in the full shortcut map. Let go, it fades. The same overlay is in the live demo at the top of this page.
Who it's for
GlassCue isn't built for a studio with a control room. It's built for whoever's reading this — recording themselves, on their own Mac, in whatever app the take is going into.
For the YouTube creator
You're not running a control room. You're recording on a camera, into a Mac, with maybe an audio interface and a ring light. GlassCue floats over Camo or QuickTime, your script scrolls under your lens, your shortcuts work from the camera app — and the retake markers turn the cut into a finished video.
For the livestream host
OBS in the foreground, scene switching, chat in your peripheral vision. GlassCue floats over your OBS canvas, scrolls at the WPM your delivery actually lives at, and Calm Mode dims the screen when the show goes quiet for a second.
For the meeting presenter
Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex — pick your poison. Set the pane over your slide deck or alongside your video tile, dial in Speech Sync, and stop hunting your notes in another window. The prompter doesn't show up in screen share.
Take recovery
Hit ⌘⇧B the second a take goes sideways — a retake marker drops at your current scroll position with a wall-clock timestamp. Hit ⌘⇧T when you nail one. When the camera stops, hand your editor a CSV or JSON they can drop straight into Final Cut or Premiere. The cut starts with the takes you already knew were good.
Features
Every feature has to clear three bars before it ships: it works without the pane stealing focus, it's reachable from a configurable hotkey, and your scripts never leave your Mac because of it. If a feature fails any one of those, the feature is wrong.
Borderless, non-activating NSPanel floating above every app and every space. Your conferencing app stays foreground, your trackpad keeps working, your keystrokes keep going where you sent them.
Record in any app. GlassCue is just a layer above it.
Built native for macOS 26 with the .glassEffect API. Real backdrop refraction, real specular highlights, a real 1px optical edge. Not a translucent CSS rectangle. Not a Catalyst port.
The pane belongs on Tahoe the way Tahoe belongs on Apple Silicon.
Drag the pane anywhere on any display, resize it, tune the opacity. Quit, relaunch, plug into a different monitor — it lands where you left it. Mirror mode flips horizontally for reflective teleprompter rigs.
Set it once for your studio; it remembers everything.
On the pane, press and hold Command — a translucent overlay fades in with the full hotkey map for the mode you're in. Let go, it fades. Discoverability without a tutorial carousel.
Learn the keyboard by holding one key.
Import any common script format, or paste-as-new-script with ⌘⇧V from anywhere on your Mac. Smart-quote normalization, dash cleanup, blank-line collapse — applied at the parse layer; your source file is never modified.
Your script library is whatever directory you already keep scripts in.
Markdown headings become sections. So do keyword patterns — INTRO, OUTRO, B-ROLL, CTA — that work the way they already work in your scripts. Long paragraphs split cleanly at sentence boundaries via NLTokenizer.
Page Up / Page Down on your clicker just works.
Drop [PAUSE], [SLOW], [SMILE], [LOOK UP] anywhere in your script. The pane styles them so you can see them coming — color, weight, optional inline icon — without reading them out loud. Configurable per profile.
Direction notes that travel with the script.
Fixed WPM at frame-synced CADisplayLink rate, Speech Sync via SFSpeechRecognizer with fuzzy Levenshtein matching, or Manual with the scroll wheel and clicker. Switch modes mid-take; the prompter doesn't reset.
Whatever rhythm this take wants, the prompter can hit.
Every binding is rebindable from a real key-recording UI with live conflict detection. Defaults are sane (⌘⇧Space to toggle, Page Up/Down for clickers); change any of them in Preferences in under a minute.
The shortcuts match your hands, not the other way around.
Bright lines
Most apps have a list like this somewhere internally. We keep ours in public so you can hold us to it. If we ever do any of these things, we've stopped being GlassCue, and you're owed an explanation.
The pane is an NSPanel with `becomesKey = false`. If we ever ship a build that takes focus from QuickTime, Camo, Final Cut, OBS, or a conferencing app, the build is broken.
Smart-quote cleanup, dash normalization, paragraph splitting — all happen at the parse layer. The .md, .txt, or .rtf on disk is the source of truth. We render. We don't edit your file.
v1.0 has zero telemetry, zero analytics, zero accounts. Speech Sync runs on-device. When iCloud sync ships, it'll be opt-in and end-to-end encrypted by Apple — and you'll still be able to use the whole app without it.
When you customize a hotkey, that's the hotkey. App updates never reshuffle the bindings under you. New actions get new defaults; existing ones stay yours.
One-time purchase. Universal with the iOS app when it ships. If we ever introduce something subscription-shaped, it'll be a feature with a real ongoing server cost — not a license to keep using the app.
Apple frameworks only. No SDKs, no analytics shims, no 'helpful' embeds. The build graph is the standard library and our code; that's it.
GlassCue for iPhone & iPad is in active development. Front-camera prompter overlay rendered in real Liquid Glass on iOS 26. ProRes and Apple Log capture. BT-keyboard and MFi clicker remote. Retake-marker sidecars that drop straight into Final Cut. CloudKit syncs your scripts and profiles; Handoff and NearbyInteraction let any GlassCue device take over for any other.
Questions we get a lot
Yes — that's the whole point. The pane is a non-activating NSPanel above every space, so your foreground app stays foreground. Tested daily with QuickTime, Camo, Final Cut, OBS, Loom, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and ScreenFlow. If it runs on macOS, GlassCue can sit on top of it.
No. NSPanel is a window-level surface that the system intentionally excludes from screen capture and screen sharing by default. You see it; your audience and your recording don't. (It will appear if you explicitly capture the whole display in a full-display recording — that's expected behavior.)
macOS 26 Tahoe or later, Apple Silicon. GlassCue is built native for Tahoe — Liquid Glass via the .glassEffect API, @Observable, SwiftData, Swift 6 strict concurrency. It does not run on Intel Macs and we don't ship a Catalyst build.
On-device. SFSpeechRecognizer runs locally via the Speech framework, with fuzzy Levenshtein matching against the next sentence in your script. No audio leaves your Mac. The first time you toggle it on, macOS asks for microphone and speech-recognition permissions — both required, neither shared.
Drop in .txt, .md, or .rtf files. Markdown headings become sections. ⌘⇧V from anywhere pastes the clipboard as a new script. Cleanup (smart quotes, dashes, blank lines) happens at the parse layer — your source file is never modified.
Hit ⌘⇧B for a retake marker, ⌘⇧T for a good take, ⌘⇧G to jump back. Markers are stamped to wall-clock time. Export the log as CSV or JSON; both formats convert cleanly to FCPXML or Premiere XML markers via small adapters most editors keep around. Direct FCPXML and Final Cut Pro marker export are queued for the next minor release.
Yes, in active development. GlassCue for iPhone & iPad is the field studio — front-camera prompter overlay, ProRes / Apple Log capture, BT-keyboard remote, retake-marker sidecars that drop into Final Cut. Universal purchase with the Mac app. Get on the list at /ios.
Because a teleprompter has no ongoing server cost. We sell software once. Future major versions may be paid upgrades; minor versions and bug fixes are always free. Universal with iOS the day iOS ships.
Full keyboard control (every action is a hotkey). Reduce Motion respected throughout — animations simplify, the cmd-hold overlay fades instead of slides. Focus-region dimming is configurable. VoiceOver audit and high-contrast mode are on the roadmap for the next minor release.
In SwiftData on this Mac, in your app sandbox. Profiles too. When iCloud sync ships (medium-term roadmap), it'll be opt-in CloudKit sync — end-to-end encrypted by Apple, the same as Notes or Reminders. Until then: your scripts live where you put them and nowhere else.
GlassCue ships for macOS 26 Tahoe today. Universal with the iOS app the day iOS ships. One-time purchase. No accounts. No telemetry.
No accounts. No telemetry. No third-party dependencies. Your scripts stay on your Mac.