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    I'm Building a Tool That Lets You Draw on Your Screen

    Not a whiteboard. Not a design tool. Literally draw on top of anything — your browser, your IDE, your Zoom call. Here's how and why I'm building SketchScreen.

    C
    Chen Reuven
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    5 min read
    I'm Building a Tool That Lets You Draw on Your Screen

    I'm building a tool that lets you draw on your screen.

    • Not a whiteboard app
    • Not a design tool

    Literally draw on top of anything. Yes. Anything, Anytime, Anyplace!

    Your browser. Your IDE. Your Zoom call.

    This is the story of how and why I'm building SketchScreen.

    The Problem

    Every time I'm on a call explaining something, I think: "if I could just CIRCLE this thing on screen..."

    That thought. Over and over. For years.

    • Screen recording apps don't let you draw live
    • Screenshot tools make you leave your flow to annotate
    • The existing tools that do exist? They look like they were built in 2005

    So I'm deciding, i am building it to myself.

    Who I Am

    I'm Chen Reuven — founder of Kodami AI, RightClickAI, and co-founder of SafeDeal AI. I love to innovate and build tools. That's what I do.

    I've spent years shipping software, debugging UIs at midnight, and explaining things on calls by waving my cursor around like it means something.

    The hardest part of my job was never writing code. It was showing what I meant. Every bug report, every design review, every "hey look at this" Slack message — they all needed the same thing: a way to point at my screen and say "this, right here."

    The Tech Stack Decision That Took 3 Days

    I spent three full days just choosing the foundation:

    • Tauri for the native shell
    • Excalidraw for the drawing engine
    • Transparent, always-on-top window for the overlay

    Why Tauri Over Electron?

    The app needs to be a transparent overlay that sits on top of everything. Electron bundles Chromium — way too heavy for what should be a lightweight, always-running tool. Tauri gave me native performance with a fraction of the footprint.

    Why Excalidraw?

    I considered building my own canvas from scratch. Spent 2 days on it. It was hard.

    Then I realized: Excalidraw already solved the drawing part. But here's the catch — Excalidraw is a React app designed as a full-page editor. I needed to strip it down to just the drawing surface and overlay it on a transparent window.

    That was... a journey. A big one.

    The Hardest Problem So Far

    Getting this to work:

    • ✅ Transparent window
    • ✅ Always on top
    • ✅ Captures mouse input when you are drawing
    • ✅ Passes mouse input through when you're not drawing

    Sounds simple. It's not.

    Who Is This Actually For?

    1. Teachers giving online lessons
    2. Content creators recording tutorials
    3. Remote workers explaining things on calls
    4. Developers who share screens daily

    The common thread: people who explain things visually but are stuck using their cursor as a pointer.

    You know the move — you're on a Zoom call, sharing your screen, and you start circling your mouse around a button going "this thing, right here, see where my cursor is?"

    That's the moment SketchScreen is built for.

    2 Months of Hard Work Later

    After roughly two months of building, debugging transparent windows, fighting with OS-level APIs, and stripping Excalidraw down to its core — SketchScreen is real.

    You press a shortcut. Your screen becomes a canvas. Draw, annotate, highlight — right on top of whatever you're looking at. When you're done, you're right back where you were.

    **No app switching. No exporting. No friction. **

    Try it at sketchscreen.pro →

    Got questions or feedback? Reach out here →