Window Framer

A tiny menu-bar-only Mac app: it draws a draggable, resizable frame guide on screen so you can line up a window to an exact 16:9 or 9:16 area before you hit record — handy on an ultrawide where eyeballing the crop is hard.

What it does

• Lives only in the menu bar (no Dock icon).
• Shows an orange-bordered rectangle you can drag anywhere and resize from any corner, locked to either 16:9 or 9:16.
• Displays the current pixel size and ratio on the frame.
• "Lock Position" makes it click-through, so once it's placed you can still click on the window underneath without disturbing the guide.
• The guide is real on-screen pixels. It is not excluded from screen captures. Use it to line things up, then Hide Guide from the menu before you actually start recording.

Build it

Requires the Swift toolchain (comes with Xcode Command Line Tools). If swift --version fails in Terminal, install with:

xcode-select --install

Then, from this folder:

chmod +x build.sh   # only needed once
./build.sh

This produces WindowFramer.app in this folder.

Run it

1. Drag WindowFramer.app to /Applications (optional but recommended).
2. Right-click it and choose Open the first time — macOS will warn about an unidentified developer since this is a local, ad-hoc-signed build, not one from the App Store. Click Open to proceed. After that first launch you can open it normally.
3. A viewfinder icon appears in the menu bar. Click it for the menu:
   • Show Guide / Hide Guide — toggle the frame on/off.
   • Lock Position (click-through) — freeze it and let clicks pass through to the window below.
   • 16:9 / 9:16 — switch aspect ratio (auto-refits to screen size).
   • Size — a submenu with Fit to Screen (grows the guide to the largest size that comfortably fits your display — this is what you want on a high-res or ultrawide monitor so the guide isn't tiny) plus common resolution presets (1080p, 1440p, 4K, both orientations). Presets scale down automatically if they don't fit your screen.
   • Center on Screen — recenter without changing size.
   • Quit Window Framer.

By default the guide now opens already fit to ~90% of your screen, so it should be clearly visible on a large or high-resolution display without any extra steps.

Using it on an ultrawide

1. Show Guide, pick your ratio, drag it to where you want the recording area, resize a corner to the exact size you want.
2. Resize/move your actual app window (browser, editor, whatever you're recording) to match the guide's border.
3. Lock the guide if you want to keep clicking around inside your app window while double-checking alignment.
4. Hide Guide, then start your screen recording as normal.

Notes / things you might want to tweak

• Default starting size is 1280×720; edit initialSize in Sources/WindowFramer/main.swift (OverlayWindowController.init) if you want a different default.
• Minimum guide size is 160pt on the short side (minSize in continueResize) — raise or lower it if the corners feel too twitchy at small sizes.
• Colors/border thickness are in OverlayView.draw if you want a different look.
• It only remembers one guide at a time (per your call to keep it simple); if you later want both ratios visible simultaneously, that's a second OverlayWindowController instance plus a second menu section.