PGari Glowee: Mac brightness with window spotlight

Screen record on a Mac, then put a spotlight on one window

Short answer: Nothing extra is needed to screen record on a Mac. Press Shift-Command-5, pick Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion, and click Record; Apple's Screenshot app handles the rest and drops the file on your desktop. The trouble starts afterwards. A recording of the whole screen shows the whole screen — your inbox, your Slack window, the six tabs you meant to close — sitting beside the one thing you were actually explaining. PGari Glowee deals with that half. Its Spotlight dims everything except the window you are in, on any Mac display, and because the dimming is painted onto the screen it lands in the recording and in a shared screen exactly as your viewers will see it. Glowee records nothing itself.

What a viewer sees in a screen record on a Mac with Glowee's Spotlight running: one window at normal brightness and the rest of the screen turned down

One naming problem before we start: Apple uses "Spotlight" for the search you open with Command-Space bar, the one that "helps you quickly find things on your computer". Everything below concerns a lighting effect that happens to share the word.

Everything you need to screen record on a Mac is already installed

Apple's own steps, from its New Zealand support page.

Shift-Command-5. An onscreen toolbar appears, with still-image controls first and recording controls after them.
Decide what to capture. Record Entire Screen, or Record Selected Portion and pull its borders out to whatever size suits. A third option, Record Selected Window, arrived with macOS Tahoe 26.
Look at Options before you press Record. Choose a microphone if you want your voice on the take. Ticking Show Mouse Clicks puts a black circle around the pointer every time you click. There is a countdown timer, a "Save to" location — the desktop by default — and, on supported Macs running macOS Tahoe 26 or later, a choice between SDR and HDR capture.
Click Record. Pressing Esc before you click cancels the whole thing.
Stop with the Stop button up in the menu bar, or with Command-Control-Esc.

Apple names the saved file "Screen Recording [date] at [time].mov". A thumbnail appears in the corner when you finish; click it to trim straight away, or leave it and the file saves itself.

QuickTime Player is the same road by a different door: File > New Screen Recording opens the Screenshot tools. Two limits Apple documents are worth remembering — some apps, the Apple TV app among them, may not let you record their windows, and recording the Mac's own system audio is listed as an option in macOS 27 Golden Gate or later.

Lighting the window you are talking about

When you screen record on a Mac, the walkthrough is almost always about one thing on screen: the spreadsheet, the code editor, the one browser tab. Everything else is scenery, and in a full-screen capture the scenery is in every frame.

Spotlight, in Glowee, dims the entire screen apart from the window you are in.

Switch it on at the sun in the menu bar, or with ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S wherever you happen to be. The same chord switches it off, so you can change your mind mid-take without going near a menu.
Pick the strength — Off, Soft or Strong — by how crowded the screen is. Whatever level you used last is the level it returns at.
The light travels with your clicks. Moving from the slide deck to the browser and back needs no re-aiming.
Pin it with Pinned so a stray click during a long take does not drag the light somewhere else.
Any Mac display, internal or external, XDR or otherwise. A MacBook Air is no obstacle.

Because the dimming is a layer drawn on the screen itself, whatever captures the screen captures it too — and, as Glowee's own FAQ puts it, "there is nothing to mask in the edit".

Why the capture has to include the surroundings

The whole effect lives in the area around your window, which means the recording has to contain that area for anyone to see it. So when you screen record on a Mac for an audience, make the frame wide enough to carry the effect: record the entire screen, or draw a selected portion generous enough to take in the dimmed margin. Frame tightly around the window alone and you have recorded the one part of the screen that Spotlight deliberately left alone.

Why a boosted screen records as normal

Glowee's other half, Extra Brightness, pushes an XDR display past where the macOS brightness slider stops. That is left out of captures on purpose, so a recording made on a boosted screen looks entirely ordinary to whoever watches it: it is for your eyes while you work, not for the audience. The panel has to be an XDR or other EDR one for it to do anything at all, which in practice means a MacBook Pro 14″ or 16″ from 2021 onwards; the MacBook Pro brightness guide works through that side. Spotlight is the half your viewers actually receive.

Live: meetings, classes, a projector in the room

The same reasoning holds when the audience is watching in real time, which for anyone working out of New Zealand with a team on the other side of the world is most of the week. Leave your slides in an ordinary window instead of going full screen, share the whole screen, and bring Spotlight up. The notes, the chat and the desktop behind the window all drop back, so the meeting stays on the slide rather than on your notifications. Teaching over a call with a crowded screen, it keeps the document or the whiteboard lit and pushes the rest back, and nobody has to interrupt to ask which window you mean.

The constraint is the same as for recording: the dimming lives in the surroundings, so share the screen rather than a single window.

macOS can help from its side too. Show Notifications: when mirroring or sharing the display, in System Settings → Notifications, decides whether banners are allowed through while you present. Apple silicon Macs on macOS Sonoma 14 or later have Presenter Overlay as well, which "elevates your presence by including you on top of the screen that you're sharing when on a video call". That is Apple's own, with no bearing on Glowee.

Six tools that all use the word spotlight

Several Mac apps for presenters use the term and none of them means quite the same thing. The middle column below is in each case the maker's own wording about its own product.

Tool	What it says it does
macOS Screenshot	Show Mouse Clicks puts a black circle around the pointer when you click
Mouseposé (Boinx)	Dims the screen and shines a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer; makes keystrokes visible; highlights mouse clicks
Presentify	Annotate the screen, draw on a whiteboard, highlight the cursor, spotlight or zoom in on key areas
Scribbble	Draw over anything on your Mac screen; its Spotlight dims everything except a circle around your cursor; magnify and zoom
Screen Studio	A macOS screen recorder with automatic zoom and smooth animations, which zooms in on your cursor and smooths its movement
PGari Glowee	Dims everything except the window you are in; the light follows when you click another window

Read down the middle column and the split is obvious: four of the six follow the cursor, one is a recorder in its own right, and one works on a window. Glowee lifts a window out. It does not highlight the pointer, draw, zoom or record. If your viewer needs to follow a single button or one line of code, a pointer or annotation tool is the right purchase. Where the job is instead to hold their eye on one window for minutes at a time while you work inside it, a window spotlight is. A good many tutorial makers end up with one of each. More on the window side in marking out the active window and dimming inactive windows.

Questions that come up

Which shortcut starts a screen recording on a Mac?

Shift-Command-5 brings up the Screenshot tools; choose what to capture, then click Record. Command-Control-Esc stops it. From QuickTime Player, File > New Screen Recording opens the same tools.

Can my voice go onto the same recording?

Yes — pick a microphone under Options in the Screenshot toolbar, and do it before the take starts rather than after.

Will Spotlight show up in the recording or on a shared screen?

Yes. The dimming is a layer on the screen, so anything that captures the screen captures it, and there is nothing to paint out afterwards. The one exception is the plain brightness boost, which captures leave out.

What is Spotlight on a Mac, then?

Two answers, depending on which Spotlight. Apple's is the search opened with Command-Space bar, which shows suggestions from apps, files, actions, the internet and the Clipboard. Glowee's is a dimming effect for presenters, run with ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S.

How is the spotlight effect switched off?

Press ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S again, or choose Off under Spotlight in the menu. Quitting Glowee returns the display to normal on the spot.

Is a MacBook Pro required?

No. Spotlight is ordinary dimming and will run on any display; Extra Brightness is the only part that depends on an XDR or other EDR panel.

Can I try it before buying?

Yes. Seven days free, everything unlocked, no account asked for. What follows is a one-off purchase — one Mac, or three Macs on one key — refundable for a month if it turns out not to earn its place.

Try it on your next take

PGari Glowee is a menu bar app and nothing more: under 2 MB on disk, macOS 13 or later, the same binary for Apple silicon and Intel. It puts no kernel extensions and no background helpers into your system, and the instant you quit, the display is back exactly as it was.

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