Walkthrough Recorder

Describe a task in plain English and it records a narrated demo of it in TextBox — video, step screenshots, and printable guides.

1. Install two prerequisites

One time, in Terminal:

brew install node ffmpeg

No Homebrew? Get Node from nodejs.org and ffmpeg from evermeet.cx/ffmpeg.

2. Open the app

Unzip it and drag TBTrainer to your Applications folder.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/TBTrainer.app

On first launch it installs its own private copy of Chromium (~150 MB). That's separate from your everyday browser and only used for recording.

3. Sign in to TextBox

Open Settings (⌘,) and enter the TextBox URL plus your own login. The password goes into your macOS Keychain — never into a settings file, and it never appears in a recording, because sign-in happens before capture starts.

Click Check setup; everything should come back green.

4. Add an Anthropic API key

Only one part of this uses Anthropic: turning your sentence into a list of steps. Recording, re-recording and editing never touch it.

1. Go to console.anthropic.com and create an account (or sign in).
2. Settings → Billing — add a card and buy some credit. $5 goes a long way.
3. Settings → Limits — set a monthly spend cap so it can never surprise you. $10/month is plenty.
4. API Keys → Create Key. Name it "Walkthrough Recorder" and copy it straight away — the full key is only shown once.
5. In the app: Settings → Creating new walkthroughs → paste the key → Save key.

The key is stored in your Keychain and only ever sent to Anthropic.

5. Record something

Type what you want shown and press Record:

Make a demo walkthrough for how to add a contact

Everything lands in ~/Movies/TBTrainer. Past walkthroughs are listed in the sidebar — click one to play the video or open the guides.

Fixing one that came out wrong

The planner works from what it can see on screen, so it sometimes misses a control — a toggle inside a settings pane, a button behind a menu.

Right-click the walkthrough → Edit steps…. TextBox opens with a step panel on the right:

• Go here replays to that step, putting you on the screen that needs fixing
• Then click the element you want — no selector typing
• Edit the wording inline, reorder, delete, insert
• Save, then Record again

Customer data is replaced automatically

Every contact name, phone number, email and street address is swapped for a generated stand-in before it reaches the screen, so recordings made against a live account are safe to share. The same real person always becomes the same stand-in across every frame, screenshot and PDF. Numbers use the reserved 555 range and emails use example.com.

Replacement finds names by field name. If TextBox adds a screen with a name field the tool hasn't seen, it could show through — each run flags anything suspicious with an orange triangle in the sidebar. Worth a glance before sharing a recording widely.

Two things worth knowing

• History is per-Mac. It lives in ~/Movies/TBTrainer on the machine that recorded it. To share one, send the folder or just the MP4/PDF.
• Walkthroughs that flip a switch (like "switch to dark mode") flip whatever state they find. If dark mode is already on, re-recording shows it being turned off while the narration says "on". Set it back first.

Narration

Each step is read aloud using a macOS voice, and the step is held on screen until the sentence finishes. The stock voices are mediocre — download a Siri or Premium voice under System Settings › Accessibility › Spoken Content › System Voice › Manage Voices and pick it in the app's Settings.