# A teleprompter that lives in the Mac's notch and fills the iPhone _Teleprompter Island, our own app for macOS and iOS, keeps the script right under the camera, out of screen shares, and in step with your voice_ > Teleprompter Island is a teleprompter for macOS and iOS, designed and built by insidethebox. On a MacBook the script scrolls in a black island around the notch, right under the camera, and stays out of screen sharing and recordings. On the iPhone the island becomes the whole screen. - Tags: Productivity, 2026, macOS & iOS App - Client: Teleprompter Island - Industry: Productivity - Year: 2026 - Services: [mobile-app-development](https://www.insidethebox.dev/services/mobile-app-development.md), [application-development](https://www.insidethebox.dev/services/application-development.md) - Outcome: Version 2.0 for Mac and iPhone, with the Mac app ready to download. - Source: https://www.insidethebox.dev/work/teleprompter-island It is our own product rather than a client's: two apps, one for the Mac and one for the iPhone, built on one shared Swift engine. On the Mac the script lives in the notch. On the iPhone it fills the screen. ## Challenge Reading from a screen while you talk to a camera has two problems. The words are never where the lens is, so your eyes drift away from the people watching. And on a call, whatever you read from can end up in the screen you share. A MacBook's notch sits right under the camera, which makes it the one place on the screen where reading looks like eye contact. The app had to put the script there, keep it out of every recording and screen share, and keep pace with the way people actually talk. ## On the Mac A black panel covers the notch and the menu bar around it, welded to the top of the screen so the cutout and the panel read as one shape. The script scrolls inside it, above every other window, and fades in at the bottom and out at the top. With nothing to read, the island shrinks back to the size of the notch. Every window the app opens is excluded from screen capture. In QuickTime, Zoom, Teams, Meet, Discord and OBS the island is simply not there, so the audience sees the presentation and not the notes. Because the app hides itself rather than watching the screen, it needs no Screen Recording permission. Display mirroring and AirPlay copy the screen below the level where this works, so they are the one case where the script can be seen. Global shortcuts play, pause, restart and change the speed while Keynote, PowerPoint or a browser is in front, and a small control deck holds the same controls. Scripts live in a three-column library, imported from text, Markdown, RTF, Word or OpenDocument files, and never leave the Mac. ## Voice follow Turn on voice follow and the script listens. The words you have said glow, the next few pulse, and the script scrolls with your voice instead of at a fixed speed: it waits when you pause and catches up when you skip ahead. Recognition runs on the device, through Apple's own speech framework, so no audio leaves the Mac or the iPhone. The matcher only moves forward, allows a skipped or ad-libbed word, needs two words that agree before it jumps, and ignores case, accents and punctuation, so a Greek script typed without accents still follows accented speech. The glow sweeps through each word letter by letter, at the speaker's pace. On the Mac, a pace guide does the same without a microphone: each word lights up when it is time to say it, timed so the script ends on a target between 110 and 170 words a minute. ## On the iPhone On the iPhone the island becomes the whole screen: pitch black, with the same blue bloom hanging from where the island would be, the same fade and the same voice glow, drawn by the same code as on the Mac. Scripts are written in the Library or imported from Files. Play opens the script full screen with one row of Liquid Glass controls: Restart, Play in the centre, Voice and Options. A three-second countdown, with a tap of haptics on each number, holds the script blurred until it starts. Tapping the script pauses it, dragging finds your place, and the screen stays awake while you read. It scrolls at 120 Hz on ProMotion iPhones, in portrait and landscape. ## Live Activity While a script is being read, a Live Activity shows the elapsed time in the Dynamic Island and on the Lock Screen, with how far through the script you are. Leave the app and the reading pauses, and the activity holds the time and the place where you stopped. The timer is the system's own, counting from a fixed start, so it stays right to the second without waking the app. ## Engineering Both apps link one local Swift package: the scroll engine, the script library and its importers, voice follow, text layout and the shared SwiftUI views. The Mac app keeps only what belongs to the Mac: the window above the menu bar, the notch geometry, the capture shield and the hotkeys. The script is not a scroll view. It is a clipped column moved on every refresh of the display, so a frame costs one layer position change, and the engine is measured against the clock to scroll at exactly the speed asked for. The island's outline is one path rather than three shapes, so no seam shows at fractional scale factors, and the same path decides where a click lands. A test asks the system's capture API which windows a recorder can see and fails if the island is among them, and it is run once with the shield switched off to prove that it can fail. Even the app icon is drawn in code, from the island's own outline and colours. ## Download Teleprompter Island 2.0 for the Mac is signed with our Developer ID and notarized by Apple. It runs on macOS 15.6 or later, and voice follow needs macOS 26. The iPhone app needs iOS 26 and is on its way to the App Store. Version 1.0 came out on 22 September 2026. Version 2.0, which added the iPhone app, followed two days later.