Pinpoint 0.6.0: a crop tool, capture timers, and a changelog you can actually find

Quick refresher if this is your first time seeing it: Pinpoint is a free, MIT-licensed macOS menu-bar app that lets you capture a region of your screen, drop numbered markers on it, and copy an annotated image plus a structured text block that maps every marker to a position and a note. The point is to stop describing pixels to your AI agent in prose ("the button in the top-right, no, the other one") and start pointing at them instead. Source and download are on GitHub; there's a landing page at pinpoint-ashy.vercel.app.

I just shipped 0.6.0, and this one is special for a reason I'll get to at the end. Here's what's new.

1. A crop tool in the editor

You can now trim a capture right in the editor, with eight handles and a rule-of-thirds grid. The part I care about most: existing markers and arrows are remapped into the cropped frame — they don't drift, they stay pinned to the elements you pointed at.

Why this matters for an agent workflow: the tighter the region you hand the model, the less irrelevant UI it has to reason about. Before, if I over-captured, I'd either re-shoot or send a noisy image. Now I capture generously, then crop down to exactly the elements I'm talking about — and because positions are stored as percentages of the image, the marker map stays correct after the crop.

2. An optional capture timer

There's now a 3, 5, or 10-second countdown before the shot fires. Press Esc to cancel.

This sounds small until you hit the case it solves: capturing UI that only exists while you're interacting with it. Hover states, open menus, dropdowns, tooltips — anything that disappears the moment you reach for a shortcut. Start the timer, arrange the UI, let it fire. It's the classic screenshot-timer trick, but wired into the same capture-to-clipboard flow so you don't leave the app.

3. A "What's New…" menu item

Tiny, but I'd been meaning to add it: a "What's New…" entry in the menu that opens the changelog. So you can always see what each release actually added without digging through GitHub tags. Dogfooding the idea that a tool should tell you about itself.

The part that makes this release special

The crop tool and the capture timer weren't written by me. They were contributed by @ganuong11 — the first external contributions to Pinpoint.

I built this thing for myself, scratched my own itch, open-sourced it mostly so it wouldn't rot in a private repo. Watching someone else read the code, understand the marker-remapping model well enough to make crop preserve it, and send a clean PR — that's the moment an "open-source project" stops being a solo repo with a license file and becomes an actual project. It's a good feeling, and I wanted to say so publicly.

Try it

If you pair-program with an AI agent on a Mac, grab 0.6.0 — it's notarized, signed, and everything stays local (captures never leave your machine). If you've got a better idea for the annotated-capture format, or a feature you want, issues and PRs are welcome — there are a couple of good-first-issues open, and as of this release, merged PRs are officially a thing that happens here.

Next on my list: refining the copied prompt format further. The percentage-based marker map plus a baked-in legend is my current answer to "what does a screenshot prompt need to contain for an agent to act without follow-up questions?" — but I'm still iterating, and I'd like to hear how you're solving it.

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Baptiste — freelance web dev for 20 years, building in Laravel/PHP and shipping small open-source tools.