DEV Community

tuan tran
tuan tran

Posted on

I got tired of chaining 3 apps to translate a Korean dialog in a screenshot, so I built one Swift app that does it

What started as "translate dialogs in a Korean game without alt-tabbing to Google Translate" became a rewrite of my screenshot toolchain. A few months later, one app:

  • Capture area, window, or fullscreen
  • Copy the text out of any screenshot, like it were a document
  • Translate a foreign-language screenshot in place, offline
  • Long pages stitch into one tall image
  • Screen record with a camera bubble

What I'm most happy with: zero network calls for reading and translating text. Screenshots carry API keys, client work, personal chats. Mine never left the Mac, and that felt like the right default for everyone's.

Tech notes, happy to go deeper in comments:

  • Pure Swift and SwiftUI, no Electron. About 25MB
  • Apple's Vision framework for reading text. Genuinely scary good for how cheap it is
  • One hotkey, everything else lives in menus

Building in public. How you extract text from screenshots today would help me know what to chase next. Trial: https://ishot.buzz?utm_source=devto

Top comments (0)