The first time you open Cue Canvas, a short welcome window explains what it does and walks you through the two macOS permissions it can use:
- Screen Recording. Needed for the zoom lens, full-screen zoom, and screenshots.
- Accessibility. Needed for global keyboard shortcuts and the keystroke display.
You don’t have to grant either one to use Cue Canvas. Annotation, the palette, and everything else that doesn’t need them works right away. If you skip a permission now, the features that need it will tell you exactly what’s missing and how to grant it later, the same way this window does.
Granting a permission
For each one, this window shows whether it’s already granted and, if not, exactly where to turn it on (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording or → Accessibility). After granting one in System Settings, quit and reopen Cue Canvas. macOS only applies a new permission grant to a freshly launched copy of the app, not one that’s already running.
Click Get Started when you’re done, or Skip to come back to this later. Either way, Cue Canvas won’t show this window again. If you want to grant a permission afterward, any feature that needs it will guide you through the same steps when you try to use it.
Knowing what a click will do
The pointer changes shape to tell you which tool is active before you press anything:
| Pointer | What it means |
|---|---|
| Crosshair | A drawing tool is active. Pen, line, arrow, rectangle, ellipse or highlighter. Clicking and dragging puts a mark on screen. |
| I-beam | The text tool is active. Click where you want the text to start, then type. |
| Ordinary arrow | Nothing will be drawn. Either the eraser is selected, or Cue Canvas is letting your clicks through to whatever is underneath. |
That last row is the one worth remembering during a call. When you switch Cue Canvas to click-through, so you can use the app you’re presenting. The pointer goes back to the ordinary arrow straight away, even if you haven’t moved the mouse. If you see the normal arrow, your clicks are reaching the app underneath, not the overlay.
The pointer also returns to normal whenever it’s over the Cue Canvas toolbar, so the toolbar’s own buttons behave like buttons anywhere else.
The toolbar
The floating toolbar shows every tool Cue Canvas can use, with its keyboard shortcut printed underneath: pen, line, arrow, rectangle, ellipse, highlighter, text and select. The tool you’re using is filled in blue, so you can always see which one is active, including when you picked it with the keyboard rather than by clicking.
Drag the toolbar anywhere you like; it stays where you put it, per display,
across launches. Shift+Cmd+P hides and shows it.
The toolbar is never in a screenshot or in a shared screen. Your audience sees your annotations, not the tools you drew them with.
Quitting
Cue Canvas has no Dock icon. It lives in the menu bar, as the pencil icon near the clock. Two ways to quit:
Cmd+Q, from anywhere. It works whatever app you’re in, and it works while you’re in the middle of typing a text label.- The menu bar icon → Quit.
Any setting you just changed is written out first. Annotations themselves are not saved. They live on the overlay for the session, and quitting clears the screen, the same as right-clicking does.