catchroll

A visual canvas for web content, transcripts, PDFs, images, docx, xlsx, and your notes. Real redaction. Your own files, ready for AI

Your research is scattered: tabs, screenshots, files, notes you can't find again. catchroll catches the piece that mattered and puts it on one canvas, with what it looked like, what it said, and where it came from. CAPTURE Six ways to capture a web page: a region you draw, the visible window, a single element, a transcript panel (including the text scrolled out of view), a full scrolling column, or Paged Scroll for pages that swap their content in place. Each capture keeps the page's address and title with the picture, plus its text when there is any. Scroll Column follows your own scrolling. When you move a results list to its next page, catchroll follows the page you move to and never clicks Next for you. If you navigate away in the middle of a scroll capture, the popup offers the capture back, and RESUME HERE can continue it after you click. If a scroll capture stops early or misses part of the page, the file says so. BRING IN YOUR OWN Bring in your own work with ADD FILE, by dragging it onto the canvas, or by pasting with Ctrl+V. Pictures, PDFs, plain text, and Word and Excel documents saved as .docx and .xlsx all work, and each page of a PDF becomes its own tile. Draw a text box and type, or paste copied text onto the board and it becomes a text box. A rich copy from a document, a spreadsheet or a web page keeps its headings, lists, tables and links. ARRANGE Drag, resize and select tiles on one big canvas. Draw with pen, arrow and box, and undo your marks. Info cards show each tile's title and what kind of tile it is. LOCK keeps tiles where they are, and PRESENT switches to a simple toolbar with large icons for recording and screen sharing. REDACT Black out, pixelate or blur any part of a tile. You see the result while you drag, and it is burned into the pixels, not laid on top. Redaction destroys the pixels and removes the saved text and the source pointer from every file you save or export. Redacting any part of a tile removes all of that tile's saved text and its source, no matter how it got onto the canvas. The picture keeps everything outside the blacked-out area, so an AI given the .catchroll or a PNG can still read what's visible; the .md has no pictures, so it shows that tile as withheld. Its limits: black-out can leave a one-pixel edge around its box that still holds part of the original colour, a thin line, not enough to read. Pixelate and blur keep a coarse shape of what was there, and very large text can stay readable under them, so use black-out for anything that must be gone. A copy you made before redacting (Ctrl+C or COPY PNG), a file you saved before it, and a board you had already assigned the tile to keep the original. SAVE AND SHARE Save your canvas as a .catchroll file, export PNGs, or press EXPORT FOR AI for a Markdown .md. Either file can go to an AI. The .md from EXPORT FOR AI is text only and the lightest to share; the .catchroll carries the same reading plus every picture. Working with someone? Send them the .catchroll. Each of you can open it, take it to your own AI, and paste the answer back onto the canvas as a text box. GETTING STARTED 1. Click the catchroll icon and pick one of the six capture buttons. Region, Scroll Column and Element also have keyboard shortcuts. Or press OPEN CANVAS and start with ADD FILE, or drop a file onto the canvas. 2. For Scroll Column, drag the column to the width you want, press BEGIN, then scroll the page yourself: the mouse wheel, a held down arrow, or middle-click autoscroll. The speed meter reads GOOD or EASE UP, and turns red with SKIPPING only when part of the page was actually missed. Press DONE at the end. 3. Captures land in the popup's roll, which holds your most recent captures: up to ten, and fewer when they are very large. A new capture pushes the oldest out. 4. Select captures and press CANVAS to send them to the canvas, or save them as PNG files. 5. Arrange, draw, add text boxes and redact. SAVE writes a .catchroll file, and EXPORT FOR AI writes the .md. 6. Reopen your work with LOAD, or CONNECT FOLDER and open boards from the LIBRARY. Double-clicking a .catchroll in your file manager does not open it in catchroll. GOOD TO KNOW - A capture includes what sits inside your frame, even text behind an overlay in that area. Close floating chat and message windows before you capture. - Element and Transcript tell you before they capture when their text includes characters the picture doesn't show. Only your own click or key answers that prompt. A page built to mislead can still restyle, reword or cover it, or move the focus so that your own Enter or Space presses Capture, so on a page you don't trust, read the prompt with care before you answer it. - Redaction changes the tile on the canvas and every file you save from it afterwards. The popup's roll keeps each capture as it was taken until it leaves the roll. - Some pages can't be captured, such as Chrome's own pages and the Chrome Web Store. There, catchroll does not prompt at all. - There is no account to sign in to, and catchroll collects no analytics or usage data and sets no tracking identifier. It sends nothing to a server: your captures and what you add stay in Chrome and in the files you save until you move them yourself. - catchroll asks for no clipboard permission. It reads the clipboard only inside a paste you make (Ctrl+V on the canvas or in a text box), and writes it only when you copy: Ctrl+C, COPY PNG, COPY PATH, or the popup's copy button. Describes build 1.1.0.