Teleprompter for Mac, nothing to download

The camera is above the screen, and the script is in the middle of it

On a laptop the camera sits at the top edge of the display and the reading line sits across the middle of the stage. Those two facts fight each other: the taller the browser window, the further the words are from the lens, and the more obviously your eyes drop while you read.

So the useful move on a Mac is to make the window shorter and push it to the top of the screen. A window about half the height of the display puts the reading line only a few centimetres below the camera, which is close enough that nobody watching can tell where you are looking. The dock stays pinned to the bottom edge of the stage as the window shrinks, so the controls are still there.

This is also the reason fullscreen is not automatically the right choice at a laptop. Fullscreen centres the reading line on the whole display, which is the furthest from the camera it can get.

What fullscreen actually does

Fullscreen here applies to the stage, not to the page. The marketing copy below it and the browser's own furniture go away, the stage grows to the height of the display, and the dock comes with it, so speed and size are still one click away instead of being locked out until you exit.

Coming back out puts you on the same line you were on. The position is kept as a share of the way through the script rather than as a pixel offset, which matters because the stage just changed height: a pixel offset would leave you somewhere else in the text. Your speed, size and colours are unchanged too.

Fullscreen makes most sense on an external display, or on a second machine sitting next to the camera, rather than on the screen you are looking into.

Two displays

If you have a second screen, put the stage on whichever display is closest to the camera and leave the other one for the camera app, the call, or the notes you are not reading from. An external webcam clipped to the top of the monitor you read from turns a two-screen desk into a workable prompter rig at no cost.

The stage sizes itself to the browser window, so it does not care which display it lands on. Drag the window across, resize it under the camera, and it lays out again.

Text size at a desk

Text size runs from 24 to 96 and starts at 44. At a desk you are much closer to the screen than someone reading a tablet from across a room, so 44 is often larger than you need. Smaller text puts more lines in view, and more lines give you more warning of what is coming. That is most of what makes a read sound unhurried.

Set it the same way you would anywhere else. Sit where you will sit, play a paragraph, adjust, and leave it.

Recording at a Mac

This tool scrolls a script. It does not record video, so the recording is your camera's job or your screen recorder's.

That matters in one specific way: if you record the screen the prompter is running on, the prompter is in the recording. For a talking-head shot that is fine, because you are recording the camera and not the screen. For a tutorial or a demo, capture a single window rather than the whole display, or put the prompter on the other display, or read from a phone or an iPad beside the lens and leave the Mac's screen for the thing you are demonstrating.

Keyboard

Space plays and pauses, M flips the mirror, F goes fullscreen. Cmd+V pastes whatever is on the clipboard into the script, and you do not have to click into the box first: the paste is caught by the page.

The shortcuts go inert while the caret is in the script box, so typing the word "mirror" into a script cannot flip the picture. To edit by typing, click into the box or reach it with Tab. And once focus is on a control, Space presses that control instead of playing, because that is what Space does to a focused button everywhere else.

Voice follow, and which browser you are in

A Mac is one of the few places where the browser you pick changes what happens to your audio. Voice follow listens while you read and moves the script to match. Browsers that can run speech recognition on the device do it there and the audio does not leave the machine. Browsers that cannot, which today includes Safari, hand the audio to the browser vendor for transcription under that vendor's terms. The switch beside the control says which path you are on before you enable anything, and we are not in that path either way.

If recognition drops out mid-take, the timed roll picks up rather than the script stopping dead. Details, and which browsers currently sit on which side, are on the voice follow page.

Colour, and the screen as a light

The stage is dark with light text whatever theme the rest of the site is in, because that is what reads on camera. Both colours are yours to change from the dock.

At a desk the screen is close to your face, so it is a light source in the shot whether you meant it to be or not. A white stage puts soft light on you and shows up in glasses. A black stage with light text keeps the shot clean and disappears in a dark room. Neither is correct in general; shoot ten seconds each way and look at the two.

A beam splitter with a Mac

Rigs are usually built around a tablet, because a tablet lies flat in the hood and a laptop does not. A Mac can still drive one through a small external monitor, and the mirror control does the same job it does anywhere: it flips the script left to right so the reflection reads the right way round, and it flips only the script, leaving the dock readable. See mirror mode.

Your scripts stay in this browser

The script lives in this browser on this Mac. Not on our servers, not in an account, and not on your other machines. One consequence of that is easy to walk into: browsers do not share storage with each other, so scripts you wrote in Safari are not in Chrome, even on the same Mac. Pick the browser you record in and stay in it, and keep the original of anything that matters somewhere else.

The stage this page describes is on the home page. For the screen next to the camera rather than the one in front of you, see iPad and iPhone.