Share your whole screen, not a single window. That is the one rule that matters.
Why whole-screen and not a window
Cue Canvas draws in its own transparent window sitting on top of everything else. When you share a window, the conferencing app sends only that window’s own contents, so your slides go out, and the overlay on top of them does not. Nobody sees your drawings.
When you share the whole screen, the overlay is part of the picture like anything else, and everyone sees exactly what you see.
This is how window sharing works on macOS generally. It is not something we can fix at our end.
What has actually been tested
We would rather tell you what we have measured than imply more.
| App | How you share | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Google Meet | Entire screen, in Chrome | Works. Verified on two displays |
| Everything else | . | Not tested yet |
Zoom, Microsoft Teams, OBS, Discord, Slack, Loom and WebEx have not been through our test rig yet. They are expected to work when sharing the whole screen, for the same reason Meet does, but “expected” is not “checked” and we are not going to print a tick next to something nobody has run.
If you try one, we would like to hear how it went.
Before an important call
- Grant Screen Recording to Cue Canvas and restart it. Without that, the zoom and screenshot features cannot see your screen. See Getting started.
- Start a test call with yourself, share the whole screen, and draw something. Thirty seconds now beats finding out in front of people.
- Turn on the cursor highlight if you are on a laptop trackpad. A moving pointer is very hard to follow in a compressed video stream.
During the call
Shift+Cmd+Dstarts and stops annotating.Shift+Cmd+Alets your clicks through to the app underneath while your drawings stay on screen. The pointer changes back to the normal arrow so you can see which mode you are in.- Right-click wipes everything, fast, when someone asks you to move on.
A note on Discord
Discord’s Go Live drops the native pointer on macOS, so people see your drawings but not your cursor. Turn on the cursor highlight. It is drawn by Cue Canvas rather than by the system, so it survives.