Last time I left Safari refusing to record. Good news first: it does now.
On the Mac it really was plain HTTP. Browsers only allow screen capture on a secure connection, so I added a local HTTPS mode, clicked past one certificate warning, and Safari recorded like it had never complained.
The iPhone is a firm no. A web page can't capture an iPhone's screen, and there's no trick around it. So BoomerClip stopped pretending: phones and tablets now see "Recording needs a computer" instead of a Record button that fails.
That became the theme of Phase 4. A recorder that tells the truth before you press anything.
The consent screen asked a stranger where you were
Before you record, BoomerClip asks you to confirm everyone in the recording agreed to it. Reasonable.
To decide which wording to show, it quietly sent your IP address to a third-party location service. On a privacy app. Before you'd agreed to anything. The same screen then promised "no personal information" was collected.
The lookup is gone. Everyone gets the strictest wording, because I'd rather over-warn than guess your laws from your IP. Consent now lasts one visit instead of 30 days, so the next person on a shared computer gets asked too.
Microphone and computer sound, pick one
You could turn on both. You got one.
Chrome and Edge only recorded the first audio track they were handed. Firefox had its own mixing code that leaked resources and ran everything through an 8 kHz filter, so it sounded like 1997 on a bad call.
Now both sources get mixed into a single track before recording, the same way in every browser. I even measured the saved files to prove the tone and the voice were both in there.
One gotcha that isn't a bug: if you share a window, Chrome only includes its sound when you tick the audio switch in the share dialog. The app tells you before you start, and if the sound doesn't come through, it stops and offers Share again or Record without computer sound.
Firefox, forever "Finishing"
Record in Firefox without sound, press Stop, and wait. And wait.
Tell Firefox's recorder to expect video and audio, then hand it a stream with no audio, and it never starts encoding. It doesn't fail. It doesn't say anything. It just sits there. The format now names only the tracks you're actually recording, and if the browser still doesn't finish within 10 seconds, the page stops waiting and keeps whatever it has.
Meanwhile, in the test lab
- A Firefox test was supposed to record a fake screen. The setting only faked the microphone. It captured my actual screen. Nothing was saved, but I felt watched.
- Blocking site data in your browser broke Share, because reading the sign-in token threw an error before the upload even started. It falls back to memory now.
- Leaving mid-recording or mid-upload now asks first, worded for exactly what you'd lose.
- The recorder hook shrank from roughly 1,240 lines to 300. Three browser-specific workaround components deleted. Client tests: 64 → 139.
Checked by me in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari.
Confession: I wanted ads
Somewhere in all this I had an idea. Free visitors see ads, make an account and they go away. AdSense does the selling, I do nothing, money appears.
Then I ran the numbers. Roughly 12 to 13 cents a month per daily visitor. $1,000 a month needs about 8,000 people a day. A video app with that many people is also serving a lot of video, and that bill can eat what the ads bring in.
And the cost before the first cent: Google's scripts track people across sites, which means a consent banner, a rewritten privacy policy, and a lawyer asking why a privacy app is doing that.
So BoomerClip launches with no ads and no third-party scripts. I'll count totals (never people) and revisit if hosting costs climb, traffic shows up, or a sponsor knocks. One rule is already set in stone: no ad code ever runs on a page that holds a recording. A script on that page could read the video and the link to it, and "seen once, then gone" would become "seen once, by you and an ad network."
Cliffhanger: what does the app actually keep?
The recorder is honest now. Next I had to write a privacy policy, and you can't write one until you know what the app really stores.
I went looking. The logs remembered more than I did.
Seen once, then gone. And now, it says so before you press Record.
~ Jer