Recording the iOS Simulator

The trick

Xcode's iOS Simulator runs in a regular macOS window: a macOS title bar on top, a black device frame around the screen, and the iOS UI inside. Record the whole thing and your viewer sees a Mac window, not an iPhone.

ShipClip fixes this in two moves: capture the Simulator as a single window, then crop the title bar and frame off in the editor.

1. Pick window mode

In the recording bar, switch the source picker to Window. Click the Simulator window. ShipClip records just that window through to its end edges, ignoring everything else on screen.

This already beats fullscreen capture: no Dock, no menu bar, no other windows leaking into your demo.

2. Crop the macOS chrome

Open the recording in the timeline. In the Screen inspector, toggle Edit regionto see the full source with a dashed overlay and 8 resize handles. Drag the top edge down to hide the macOS title bar. Tighten the side and bottom edges if there's any black device frame visible.

For pixel-perfect crops, the inspector also exposes Left, Right, Top, and Bottom sliders. Dragging any slider auto-shows the full-source overlay so you can see what you're cutting.

Crop is per-recording. It doesn't carry over to future sessions and never saves into a style preset.

3. Round the corners (optional)

Bump the screen corner radius up to 200px in the Screen inspector to match the iPhone bezel curves. The cropped recording starts looking like a phone-shaped clip without anyone needing to know it came from a Simulator.

See it in action

Here's a 90-second walkthrough using exactly this workflow on a real iOS demo:

Watch the demo→

Tips

• Set the Simulator to a single device size before recording. Resizing mid-recording works but means re-cropping later.
• Use ⌘+1 in the Simulator to lock to 100% scale, so the crop coordinates stay consistent across takes.
• Turn on Do Not Disturb on your Mac before recording so notifications don't fly across the Simulator window.
• For multiple Simulator devices in one demo, record each in its own ShipClip session and stitch them in your slide deck or use multiple takes.