Protostar

There is a moment at the end of every release where the app is done and the work is not. The build is uploaded, the release notes are written, and then App Store Connect asks for the screenshots.

I used to make them in Figma. Every device size laid out by hand, every caption typed into a text layer, every screenshot dragged into a frame and nudged until it sat right. Then exported, renamed, and uploaded one at a time. For one app, in one language, that is an evening. Add a second language and it doubles. Change a single caption and you do the whole dance again.

For a studio of one, that math is brutal. The constellation holds five shipped apps, and a wording tweak across the catalogue could quietly eat a weekend. Somewhere between the fourth export and the fortieth rename I stopped being annoyed and started taking notes, because irritation that specific is usually a spec in disguise.

What ShotsKit is

ShotsKit is a native Mac app that treats a screenshot set the way Xcode treats a build: one source, many targets.

You compose a screenshot once. Frame, caption, background. Every device size follows from that one layout, so there is nothing to redo when Apple wants another resolution. Versions are cheap, so trying a different angle for a feature costs minutes, not another evening.

Then come the two parts I actually built it for.

Localization is one tap. Pick the locales you ship in and ShotsKit produces the full pack for each of them: captions translated, layouts intact, every size present. The difference between shipping in one language and shipping in eight stops being a cost.

And when a set is ready, it goes straight to App Store Connect. No browser tabs, no dragging forty files into forty slots. ShotsKit uploads the new screenshots and replaces the old ones, and the release is actually, finally done.

Its first customers live upstairs

Like everything here, ShotsKit exists because I needed it. Its first customers are the five shipped stars in this constellation, and every screenshot they wear next will come out of it. That is the quiet advantage of building tools for yourself: the roadmap is just the friction you hit this week.

Why "protostar"

On the homepage, ShotsKit is charted as DSA-06 and classed as a protostar: a star still gathering mass, not yet ignited. It has not reached the Mac App Store yet. It will. When it does, these Field Notes will carry its first light, and if you want to know the exact moment that happens, the subscribe box below does one job only.