RasterFox goes direct

RasterFox 2.0 now ships direct from skulkworks.dev. Same Rust-powered image compressor, but it's a notarized, Developer ID-signed download with automatic updates, so fixes reach you when I ship them instead of when review gets to them.

If you don't know it: drop images on RasterFox and it compresses PNG, JPEG and WebP with a visual before-and-after so you can check the result before you keep it, plus AI upscaling and background removal built in. Everything is processed on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.

Pricing works like the rest of the apps now. You get everything for 14 days, no account and no card. After that RasterFox stays free forever and keeps compressing unlimited images on the Balanced preset, so it never turns into a nag screen. A one-time $9.99 license, good for 3 Macs, adds the other two presets, unlimited batches, WebP output, the compression settings, 3x and 4x AI upscaling with every model, unlimited background removal, up to eight images in parallel instead of one at a time, custom save locations with filename templates, and the alternative app icons.

Dropping the sandbox fixed the thing I heard about most: the direct build writes the compressed image next to the original without asking you to grant folder access first.

Already bought RasterFox on the Mac App Store? You don't pay again. It spots your existing purchase on launch and unlocks itself, offline, with no key to type. One thing to know before you start: installing the new version the obvious way, by dragging it into Applications, replaces the App Store copy and deletes the receipt the migration reads. The migration steps walk through the right order. If you want your other Macs covered, it can email you a permanent license key from inside the app.

Settings also gained a License tab for activating, deactivating and recovering a key, and an About tab with the version, your licensing state and a manual update check. It runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Get it from the RasterFox page or with Homebrew: brew install --cask skulkworks/tap/rasterfox. Release notes live in the changelog.