What can't a web app capture, and what does the desktop companion add?
A browser tab can only photograph itself. It cannot see your trading platform, your charts, or any other window on your machine — that is a security boundary in the browser, not a missing feature. The desktop companion is what does the actual capturing.
This is the single most important thing to understand about this page, because every control on it configures something the browser cannot perform.
Browsers are sandboxed. A page can be granted access to a camera or a microphone, and it can be granted a one-off screen share that you re-authorise every time — but it cannot be granted standing permission to silently photograph other applications. If it could, every page you visit could do the same. So the web app cannot take the screenshot.
The desktop companion can, and that is most of what it is for. Running it adds:
- Silent capture of a chosen monitor at fill time, with no prompt and no visible flash.
- Video mode, including the rolling pre-roll buffer.
- A folder picker for your storage paths instead of a path you type by hand.
- Test capture and Capture now → latest trade buttons, which fire the pipeline on demand so you can prove it works before you rely on it.
- A live status row at the top of Screen capture reporting what the last capture attempt did, so a failure surfaces on the page instead of vanishing.
The app tells you which one you are in. A badge sits beside the Capture heading reading Web mode · install desktop shell for native capture. If you can see that badge, nothing on this page is capturing anything yet — you are configuring it for later.
What still works in a browser today: you can configure everything here in advance, and you can attach screenshots to any trade by hand from the Snapshot tab in the trade detail panel. Manual upload has never required the desktop app. See attaching a screenshot to a trade.
