Why the Buttons Live in the Four Corners

Capture part of your screen in Floatie and nothing is saved — a shot floats where you drew it. Since it stays on screen, you need to be able to do something with it: edit it, read the text in it, pick a color out of it, and eventually close it.

Where to put those actions was the longest argument I had with myself early on. There are close to ten of them, and a single shot can’t show them all. I decided against a fixed toolbar and split the work between corner buttons and the right-click menu.

Why there’s no toolbar

I did consider a fixed toolbar on or beside the shot. It covered the captured content, and shrinking a shot pushed it out of place and broke the layout. Captures come in every size, which a fixed-width toolbar doesn’t cope with — and the smaller the shot parked in a corner of the screen, the worse it got. So I dropped the idea.

Dividing the work: corners and the right-click menu

Right-click a shot and a menu opens. Copy, save as another format, share, edit, copy text, reset size, rotate 90°, opacity, always-on-top, close — nearly everything is in there.

But a menu shows you nothing until you open it. So the four actions I reach for most sit in the corners, visible the moment you hover. The rest stayed in the right-click menu instead of being crammed into one place.

Hence, four corners

Today Floatie puts one button in each corner of a shot. Corners are usually the emptiest part of a capture, away from the center, so they cover less of the content. A rectangular shot has exactly four of them, which felt better than stretching to five or six.

Each button can be ghost (Pro), always-on-top (Pro), edit (Pro), text recognition (OCR, Pro), shrink/enlarge, flip horizontally (Pro), color picker, cute float, share, or close — ten options, plus leaving the corner empty. Every one shows as a single SF Symbol, so the shape tells you what it is without reading a label: cursorarrow.rays for ghost, square.and.pencil for edit, text.viewfinder for text recognition.

The default layout is ghost top-left, edit top-right, text recognition bottom-left, shrink/enlarge bottom-right. Three of those four (ghost, edit, text recognition) are Pro; only the bottom-right shrink/enlarge is free. I laid it out that way because I wanted the features people use most during the 14-day trial to be the ones they see first.

The shrink/enlarge button changes its own icon between the shrink and enlarge shapes depending on the shot’s size, so you know the current state before you press it. I’d like the other buttons to reflect their state that way someday too.

Making it yours

Settings → Appearance → Corner Buttons lets you reassign all four. Pick an action that’s already on another corner and the two swap places automatically. The second step of onboarding opens this same screen and has you choose what goes where.

The preview that appears while recording uses a different set of buttons than a capture does, because what you want to do next after a recording isn’t what you want after a screenshot. Only share and close appear in both.

I don’t think corners are the one right answer. They were my compromise between not covering the content and putting the frequent actions where you can see them. The number four, and the current layout, could easily change.

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