Screen Sharing on macOS

The AceRound answer overlay is excluded from screen capture: you see it, the person on the other end does not. On macOS, however, a few meeting apps capture the screen in a way that pulls the overlay into the shared frame, and those need one setting changed.

This page has the whole procedure: change the setting if your app is on the list, then spend two minutes checking what the other side actually sees. Windows users are not affected by any of this.

Three Steps Before You Share

Step 3 is not optional. The first two steps get you to "probably fine". Only looking at the actual shared frame tells you whether your machine, your app version and your settings work together.

The Safest Route: Share a Single Window

If the interviewer only needs to see one thing — an online assessment page, your editor, a portfolio — pick Share Window instead of Share Screen in the meeting app and select just that window.

This route does not depend on any of the settings below. The other side receives the contents of that one window, and the overlay is simply not part of it. Users have confirmed the difference in practice: overlay visible when sharing the whole screen, gone the moment they switched to sharing a single window.

Only when the interviewer explicitly asks for your entire screen do you need the per-app settings below.

Per-App Quick Reference

Apps marked "nothing to change" still deserve one self-test — meeting apps swap out their capture backend between major versions.

Zoom: Switch the Screen Capture Mode

1. Update Zoom to the latest version and open Settings (gear icon, top right).
2. Select Share Screen in the sidebar, scroll to the bottom and click Advanced.
3. Under Screen capture mode, choose the option whose name contains window filtering (depending on your version it reads "Advanced capture with window filtering" or similar).

Zoom's screen capture mode decides which system interface it uses to grab the screen, and the default "Automatic" does not guarantee the one that keeps the overlay hidden. Run the self-test after changing it.

Tencent Meeting: Turn On "Prioritize Smooth Video"

While sharing, open the sharing options next to New Share and enable Prioritize smooth video. Per Tencent's own documentation, this switches the share to a higher-frame-rate path and turns off application window filtering; in our testing the overlay stays hidden on that path. At the highest quality preset the overlay can appear in the shared frame.

Test From the Interviewer's Side

1. Start a test meeting on your own using the exact app you will use for the interview.
2. Join it from your phone or a second device — that is your view of what the interviewer sees.
3. Launch AceRound and share your entire screen, with the overlay visible on your machine.
4. Check the second device: no overlay, no main window, no flicker as it redraws.

Nothing visible means you are good to go. If you can see the overlay, use one of the fallbacks below.

Repeat this test after switching computers, switching meeting apps, or updating either the OS or the meeting app.

If the Overlay Still Shows Up

Use your phone as a second screen

This path does not involve screen sharing at all, so there is nothing to be captured:

1. On the interview setup page, generate the QR code and scan it with your phone.
2. Answers appear on the phone in real time; nothing needs to be on your computer screen.
3. If you are asked to share your screen mid-interview, the panic hotkey (⌘⇧H by default, configurable in Settings) hides the overlay instantly; press it again to bring it back.

This is the recommended setup whenever the interview is likely to involve screen sharing. See Dual-Device Mode for the full walkthrough.

Join the meeting from your browser

Every major meeting platform has a web client. In Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge) sharing from the browser currently keeps the overlay out of the frame in our testing.

Safari is the exception. Users have reported that sharing the full screen from Safari does expose the overlay, while sharing a single window does not. On Safari, share a single window — or switch to Chrome or Edge.

Browser capture behaviour can change between releases too, so self-test before you rely on it.

Why This Happens

macOS gives every window a system-level property an app can set to say "leave this window out of screen capture". Once set, the system removes that window from the frame it hands to recording and screen-sharing software. Password managers, banking apps and the private notes inside meeting apps all rely on the same mechanism, and so does the AceRound overlay.

The important part: the frame is assembled by the system and handed to the other app. We can only make the declaration — which capture path that app then uses is entirely its own choice, and not something we can see or influence.

macOS has more than one way to capture the screen. Different apps — and sometimes different quality or performance presets inside the same app — go down different paths. On the mainstream path the system honours the declaration and the overlay never reaches the shared frame; we have verified this on macOS 14 and 15. A small number of apps switch to another path under specific settings, and that path ignores the declaration.

So on a Mac what decides the outcome is how the other app grabs the screen, not how new your macOS is. That is the other app's implementation choice, and every tool that relies on this system property is in the same position — no vendor can change that layer on its own. What can be done is exactly what this page does: document the settings that are known to matter, and insist on a self-test before the real thing.

Are Windows Users Affected?

No. On Windows the overlay is excluded at the desktop compositor level, which covers every capture method, and none of the above applies.

Found a New Case?

We keep testing new macOS releases and mainstream meeting apps and add new exceptions to this page. If the overlay shows up in an app that is not listed here, send us the app name, its version and your sharing settings through Contact Us — that tells us which capture path to look at.