choose what people see when you share your screen

the short version

every screen share in underway now starts with one question: what should people see?

you pick a window, a tab or the whole screen the way you always have. then, before anything of it goes into the episode, the underway tab shows it to you, and you drag a box round each part you want to show. everything outside the boxes is frosted as it is recorded.

not blurred afterwards. destroyed before it reaches the file. nobody can uncover it later, and that includes you.

why this exists

the best footage of building something is the process, not the result. hours in an editor, a terminal, a dashboard, a conversation with an ai that is writing half the code.

and almost every one of those windows has something on it that is not for an audience. the list of your other conversations down the side. a client's name in a sidebar. the tabs you have open. a notification that slides in at the wrong moment.

until now the choice was to share the whole window and hope, or not to share at all. most people chose not to share, and the episode lost the part that was most worth seeing.

the boxes are the third choice. show the conversation, not the list of conversations. show the chart, not the customer names beside it.

how it works

• press share your screen, in an interview answer, a walk me through it episode, a co-host conversation on camera, or record the screen on the context page
• pick the window, tab or screen in the browser's own picker, as before
• what should people see? opens over the underway tab, showing the share live
• drag a box round each part to keep. as many as you like. the picture updates as you draw, frosted outside the boxes, exactly as it will be recorded
• press show only the boxes. or show all of it, if there is nothing to hide. or stop sharing, and nothing of that share is kept

until you choose, none of the screen shows. the episode stays on you, so the seconds you spend drawing boxes never appear as a frosted screen in the cut.

your boxes are remembered for the next share. most people film the same window the same way every day, so most days it is one press.

why frosted can't be undone

a light blur over text is not as safe as it looks. blurred and pixelated text has been read back before, because a little of every letter survives in the smudge.

so underway does not blur the part outside your boxes. it shrinks it to about fifty pixels across, a picture of your whole screen smaller than an icon, then stretches that back up and darkens it. at that size there is no letter left in it to recover. you can still see that there was a sidebar there. you cannot see a word that was on it.

and it happens in your browser, as each frame is painted into the recording. the clear picture outside your boxes is never written to a file, never uploaded, never rendered. there is no original anywhere to go back to.

what it does not do

the boxes protect what is outside them. anything that appears inside a box is recorded, so set the window up before you start: the boxes stay where you drew them, and anything you drag under them comes into view.

if you switch to sharing a different tab while you share, the boxes no longer fit what is on screen. rather than guess, underway goes back to what should people see? and frosts everything until you draw them again.

the co-host, if you let it see your screen, sees the same frosted picture. it never gets what is outside the boxes either.

screen sharing is in chrome on the desktop. the phone cannot share its screen, so there is nothing to box there.

start a series and film episode zero for free. start free.