A clothesline earns 3000 stars: Tendedero wins on packaging, not features

A Spanish engineer built "Tendedero," a clothesline hidden behind the Mac's menu bar that hangs your screenshots. A 20-second video of it hit 1.04M views on X, and the repo got 30 stars in 3039 days. The feature had been built a year earlier and nobody noticed. This time it won because of a metaphor anyone understands at a glance, a nice animation, and launch materials that outlets could use as-is. Copying the product is too late now, but copying how it launched still works.

A 20-second video

On Oct 2026 7, Alejandro Buján, a Spanish engineer living in San Francisco, posted a line on X: "I made my Mac hang every screenshot on a clothesline," with a 20-second screen recording. The cursor touches the top of the screen, a thin line slides down with screenshots clipped to it, swaying gently. Click to copy, drag to move, and the line retracts.

By Nov 6, the post had 1.04M views, 14k likes and 540 replies on X (11-06). The author's website post reached about 1M views and 6300 bookmarks within the first three days. The same day, the GitHub repo page got 6701 views and it ranked #2 on Trendshift's Swift daily chart.

Tendedero is Spanish for "clothesline." Here's its scorecard one month later:

It was still accelerating in week five, which is rare on GitHub. Most projects peak in the week they launch.

What it actually does

A small problem: what happens to screenshots after you take them.

After you take a screenshot on macOS, a thumbnail pops up in the bottom right corner, stays for 5 seconds, and then the file lands on your desktop. People who take a lot of screenshots quickly end up with dozens of "Screenshot 2026-10-…" files on their desktop. Tendedero takes over that step: screenshots skip the desktop and the thumbnail, and go straight onto the line at the top of the screen. Move the cursor to the middle of the menu bar and the line slides down; move away and it hides.

Each gesture does one thing: click to copy, long-press to annotate, drag into an app to send a copy (the image stays on the line), drag into a folder to leave it there (removed from the line), drag to the Trash to delete it. You don't need to change your screenshot shortcut; you keep taking screenshots the way you always did.

Free, MIT open source, Apple-notarized, installable with one line of Homebrew. No internet connection, no account, no analytics.

Digital Trends writer Oct 25 named it one of his favorite Mac apps of the year, saying: "The animation is really cool, I never get tired of watching it." He added that he still prefers CleanShot X for screenshots, but it's expensive; if you want a free option, install this.

The feature isn't new, so why did it take off?

Putting it next to its peers makes it clear:

• Built into macOS: Floating thumbnails have existed since 2018. Every Mac user uses them and puts up with them.
• Dropover, Yoink: Established paid "drag-and-drop shelf" apps. Yoink has been on the Mac App Store since 2011. You still have to drag files onto them manually.
• CleanShot X: The leader among paid Mac screenshot tools. It also has a floating panel that stacks screenshots in a screen corner, which you have to dismiss manually.
• Open-source CleanShot alternatives from 2026: macshot (4037 stars), Snapzy (3520), better-shot (2439) and others copy CleanShot's all-in-one approach. In the same week they gained 86 and 72 stars, while Tendedero gained 352 (GitHub, 11-06).
• screenshot-shelf: In September 2026, someone posted an open-source tool on Hacker News for keeping recent screenshots within reach. It had almost the same features as Tendedero and got 1 points, but nobody paid attention.

The last example says the most. The difference isn't the features, it's the packaging: an everyday object as the metaphor, an animation that sways, and an idea you can explain in one sentence. Content like this is naturally suited to short video. Viewers don't need to understand the tech. In 20 seconds they know what it does and whether they want it.

The pain point is also common. Spanish tech account @ericruizm reposted it saying "no more 50 screenshots piling up on my desktop." People now also drag screenshots into AI chat boxes, so they take even more of them than before.

How the stars came in waves

Wave one: the author's own post (10-07). The author already had a modest following on X. His posts about a fan-made Dragon Ball game often got 70 to 80k views. This one got more than ten times that.

Wave two: people in different countries sharing it on their own (starting 10-08). Spanish account @ericruizm quote-posted it for 36k views (10-08). Chinese account @jedeeai posted on Oct 10: "Wow! Found a super fun screenshot tool," with 44k views. The next day GitHub gained 349 stars, the highest single-day gain so far. Tw93's trend newsletter and the LlamaFactory author also recommended it.

Wave three: media (10-08 to 10-30). French MacGeneration, Japanese Mac Otakara, Spanish El Nacional, Sspai (reprinted by Sohu and Tencent News under the headline "Tendedero: hang your screenshots out to dry"), Italian Macitynet, Digital Trends, Russian iGuides, plus podcasts and an iGeeksBlog YouTube Short. The author said that on Oct 27 he only pitched one Spanish outlet, and the rest found it on their own.

Wave four: short-video reposts. Many "comment MAC and I'll send you the link" style reels on Instagram and Facebook reposted this demo. I couldn't find their view counts. Star growth picked up again in early November. I couldn't pin down a single source, so I assume it came from these reposts and the long tail of media coverage.

Channels that didn't work are worth noting too: Tendedero's launch never made it onto Hacker News or Product Hunt.

A few things the author got right

The spread looks like luck, but the author laid the groundwork for it:

1. The homepage is a playable demo. On tendedero.app you can "take a screenshot" and watch the line slide down right in the browser, without installing anything.
2. Multilingual from the start. The website is in 8 languages, the app itself in 11 (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi and Azerbaijani), and the README in 11. Creators in different countries can start talking about it right away.
3. A press kit was ready. Introductions in eight languages, images and videos were bundled, so outlets barely had to assemble materials to write a story. There's also an llms.txt file written for AI models, containing the facts, numbers and links to coverage.
4. Download counts are public. The download button shows the cumulative total, and the data file updates weekly. That itself is a number people can cite.
5. Fast updates. In 30 days it went from 1.0 to 1.8.1, adding screen recording, clipboard images, pinning and Finder right-click to hang images. The app updates itself, and versions 1.5 and 1.6 were each downloaded nearly 6000 times, which suggests most people who installed it kept it.
6. The name and icon aren't open-sourced. The code is MIT, but the name "Tendedero" and the icon aren't covered by the license, so anyone cloning it has to pick a different name.

Plenty of copycats already

In under a month, GitHub already had more than 20 clones and ports, mostly built by Chinese developers:

The pattern is clear: the Windows and Linux copies got at most a few dozen stars. clipboardline, which changed the problem (to the clipboard) but kept the same interaction, got 300 stars in just over two weeks. The original author never built a Windows version, but that space is already crowded, and every clone still has to contend with "isn't this just Tendedero?"

If it were you

Grade C. There's something to learn, but copying it directly isn't worth it. Over twenty people have tried copying it or porting it to other systems this month, and the best has 83 stars. What's worth taking is the method, not the product.

Who it suits: indie developers who can write native desktop apps (Swift/AppKit, or WinUI on Windows), have some taste, and have already posted on X or Xiaohongshu. People who want to build a presentable open-source project and grow their following.

Who it doesn't suit: people who want to make a "Tendedero for Windows" (there's already a line of those); people who want to win by piling on features to make an "open-source CleanShot" (that lane already has five or six libraries with two to three thousand stars from 2026); people who don't want to spend half their time on animation, demo videos and the website.

How to do it: pick a different problem and use the same playbook. Find a small nuisance everyone has and the system has long ignored: the downloads folder, clipboard history, a pile of open windows, notifications, scratch notes. Give it an everyday object as the metaphor (clothesline, drawer, fridge magnet, tray), and build a small tool whose demo runs in 20 seconds, moves, and looks good. Do one thing, and map each gesture to one action. Make it free, open source, signed and notarized, installable via Homebrew, and offline.

How to get users: On launch, post on X with a screen recording, using a one-line format like "I made my Mac do X," and show the metaphor in the first three seconds of the video. Prepare at the same time: a demo that runs in the browser, a website and README in at least English, Chinese, Spanish and Japanese, a press kit, and an llms.txt. After you post, send materials directly to two or three Mac creators and outlets in Chinese and Japanese. Tendedero's single-day peak came from one Chinese account.

Timing: The wave of "fun little Mac tools" was already called out in the Digital Trends piece (which also recommended Paperman, a tool that turns your screen into paper). Ideally, ship before the end of 2026 while the trend is still hot.

Signs you've misread the situation: (1) Over the next month or two, new Mac tools built on the "everyday object metaphor + short video" approach all stall below a few hundred stars, which would mean Tendedero was a one-off stroke of luck rather than a repeatable method. (2) A future macOS update changes how screenshots are handled so they stop cluttering the desktop, or CleanShot copies the clothesline; either way, those "patch a system gap" tools shrink. (3) The reverse: projects like clipboardline that "change the problem but keep the same interaction" keep growing past a thousand stars, which would mean the method works and you should move faster.