Gifox 2 is finally here and officially out after almost a year of intense undercover work! 🎉 This post contains all you need to know about it and looks into the future plans.

Dark Mode & Catalina Support

Let’s start with the elephant in the room, macOS dark mode… Yes, every bit of the new version is fully optimized for the dark mode and looks beautiful in low light!

macOS Catalina introduced new privacy controls and requires all apps to get explicit user authorization for recording their screen. This wasn’t handled very well (at all) in the previous version and often resulted in crashes. The new version complies with new requirements and gracefully handles recording authorization issues.

If you’re still using the original version or experiencing any problems with the new one, check out the dedicated issue for details and solutions. Let us know if you end up using the SkipPrivacyValidation trick – we want to get to the bottom of this as much as you do!

Editing & Re-Export

One un-very-pleasant thing about the previous version was inability to trim the recording or export it with a different compression preset, so you’d often end up making the same recording several times until happy with the result. The new version stores raw capture data along with export configuration and allows to export it in a single click.

The built-in editor provides essential tools for fine-tuning the captured graphics: trimming, cutting, duplicating, and arranging. Cropping and overlaying are coming soon, more on that below.

Improved Design

The user interface has been refreshed and fine-tuned to look more consistent across the entire app. The library popover has got new layout and sharper icons, the item list now has contextual menus and supports multi-selection and keyboard shortcuts: Cmd+A, Delete, and Up / Down arrows. Besides, do you see anything different about the status bar icon?

Redesigned preferences pane was made more compact and comes with better organized setting groups.

Faster Compression

Major change behind the scenes happened to the media handling engine, which was reworked pretty much from the ground up to take full advantage of hardware acceleration. Apart from delivering better performance it also addresses an important issue everyone has faced at some point – an agonizing failure to complete a recording. That’s, of course, in the past now.

As a reminder, this was a very curious case that’s partly caused by requirement to run media operations in a separate process due to a problem with GPU getting stuck in discrete graphics mode and not honoring automatic switching. This would result in higher energy use and notably faster battery drain – you can find out more in the related GitHub issue.

Price & Upgrading

Now, the bad news is Gifox 2 base price went from $4.99 to $14.99 – a move that we hate but must take in order to continue the ongoing development and provide a decent level of support. The good news is all existing customers who purchased the original version can upgrade with the 35% discount.

I know that some users won’t be very happy about the paid upgrade. Money is a delicate subject and that decision didn’t come easy since, as the result, we’ll be inevitably losing some customers. To avoid unpleasant surprises we won’t be pushing this release into auto-update channel, so it’s entirely up to you. If you decide the upgrade isn’t worth it, the original version will remain available for download and continue to function as before. Alternatively, you might consider signing up with Setapp, a subscription service where the latest version of Gifox is available amongst other 160+ hand-picked apps.

The discounted upgrade is available to both Mac App Store and direct-download users. To get it open the licensing dialogue and verify you previous purchase. If you run into any troubles or want to update multiple licenses please get in touch with the support.

What’s Next

Version 2 is a big milestone not only in terms new features and improvements but also in terms what we’re able to do now and will do next. Here are some things that we’ll be focused on over the next few months:

1. Sharing & Integrations
   We’ve been looking for awhile into new integrations, like SFTP and S3, however, the current state of the sharing layer isn’t as sustainable as we initially hoped. To avoid compromising healthy parts of the app we plan to migrate it into a standalone plugin system, which would provide access to a wider range integrations.
2. Media Conversion
   Converting other media files into GIF is another long-overdue feature that will be coming soon. QuickTime movies and image sequences will be amongst initially supported formats.
3. Editing Tools
   With essentials in place the editor still lacks cropping and overlaying, so these are the priority. Cool features like boomerang and crossfading effects are also in the backlog.
4. Full-Screen Support
   At the moment Gifox doesn’t support capturing in full-screen mode, which is not the most common issue but a deal breaker in certain situations.
5. Localization
   Last but not least, is the app localization and multi-lingual support.

That’s it for now! The new version is available for download on our website, on the Mac App Store and Setapp. If you have any questions or suggestions do get in touch! You can also follow what’s going by subscribing for an occasional newsletter and following us on Twitter or GitHub.