Skull Rock Software

Mojave Paint

A macOS image editor for Apple Silicon

Coming soon to Mac App Store macOS 15 Sequoia · Apple Silicon
Mojave Paint screenshot
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About

A new macOS image editor with familiar key bindings and a somewhat retro aesthetic. Keeping the dream of the '90s alive!

No AI tools here – plenty of other apps do that. We focus on deterministic and mathematical mutations rather than stochastically generated slop.

Not much here yet, really just the proto nucleus of an image editing app. But feel free to try it out and send feedback.

Built for Apple Silicon. Requires macOS 15 Sequoia.

v0.5.1 alpha Mar 2026

Blog

Alpha version 0.5 out the door

Mar 13, 2026· John Simons

Just posted the 0.5 alpha release of Mojave Paint. Some good stuff in here! Such as: - Color and gradient swatches...

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New stuff in the 0.3 release

Feb 23, 2026· John Simons

Today's 0.3 release of Mojave Paint adds a couple of standard features: the Gradient tool and the Crop tool. They'll seem familiar and not terribly...

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Why We Replaced Bilinear with Bicubic Sampling (and How Catmull-Rom Works)

Feb 23, 2026· Claude Code

When rotating an image 45 degrees with the free transform tool, vertical edges looked like jagged staircases. The culprit was bilinear interpolation...

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New in v0.4 Mar 5, 2026

Type Layers

  • Type tool — click-to-place text with keyboard editing, blinking cursor, text selection, and cut/copy/paste
  • Rich text formatting — per-run typeface, size, color, bold, italic with Cmd+B/I/U shortcuts
  • Drag-to-create text frames with word wrapping and resizable frame width handle
  • Type layer transforms — full Move and Free Transform support including rotation with oriented bounding boxes

Tabs

  • Drag-reorderable tabs with cross-window transfer and tear-off

Filters

  • Gaussian Blur filter (GPU-accelerated)
  • Unsharp Mask filter (GPU-accelerated)
  • Mosaic (Pixelate) filter

New in v0.3 Feb 23, 2026

Gradient Tool

  • Linear and radial
  • Gradient editor
  • Dithering option to soften any color banding

    Crop Tool

    • Shift key to constrain to current aspect ratio
    • Related: Added a "reframe" tool that allows cropping in a more intuitive way, by zooming and panning within a fixed frame.

    Misc updates

    • Layer > Merge Down
    • Layer cut/copy/paste support
    • Autoselect option for the move tool

    Features in v0.2 Feb 18, 2026

    Painting Tools

    • Brush, pencil, eraser
    • Options for hardness, flow and brush size
    • Resize brush with square bracket keys or by ctrl-option dragging
    • Circle and square brush shapes

    Bitmap Place

    • File > Place to add a new bitmap onto a layer
    • Scale & rotate before rasterizing
    • Drag and drop support

    Features in v0.1 Feb 16, 2026

    Layers

    • Create, duplicate, delete, rearrange
    • Layer folders
    • Opacity & blend modes
    • Real-time thumbnails
    • Alpha masks

    Selections

    • Marching ants!
    • Rectangle, ellipse, lasso, polygonal lasso
    • Magic wand
    • Shift/Option/Shift+Option modifiers
    • Feather, invert, move
    • Fill with foreground/background color

    Canvas

    • Gesture, keyboard, and tool zoom
    • Scrubby zoom & rect-to-fit
    • Space+drag pan
    • Pixel grid at high zoom
    • Resize canvas & document
    • Crop to selection, trim

    File I/O

    • Native .beach format
    • Open JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, HEIC
    • Export PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, BMP
    • Open Recent
    • Drag and drop
    • Finder previews for .beach files

    Color

    • 8-bit & 16-bit RGB
    • 8-bit & 16-bit Grayscale
    • Mode conversion
    • Eyedropper
    • Foreground/background swatches (swap X, reset D)
    • Levels adjustment

    Channels & More

    • RGB composite & individual channels
    • Luminosity selections via Cmd+click
    • Free transform
    • Invert filter
    • Multi-document tabs with MRU
    • Named undo history

    Roadmap

    v0.1 Just the foundations. Layers, selections, selection tools, alpha masks, color modes, and a couple of adjustments (invert and levels) as a proof of concept.
    v0.2 Painting tools. Brush, pencil and eraser. Also in this release: File > Place or drag file in to place it.
    v0.3 Gradient tool and Crop tool
    v0.4 Type. It's just one word but boy was it a lot of work. This is just a minimum viable product version of a type tool. Font, size, color, bold/italic.
    v0.x Filters. Adding in a handful of the most useful filters brightness/contrast, threshold, etc.
    v0.y Layer improvements. Need to implement layer locking, layer linking between color layer and alpha mask layer, as well as Merge Down and a few other things.
    v0.z Transforms. All the standard transforms besides Free Transform, including rotate, mirror, etc.
    v1.0 All of the above, along with the updated design language, should make for a reasonable 1.0 release. This design language will involve a lot of non-antialiased pixel art and depth effects, for a skeuomorphic and pleasantly clickable look and feel.
    Post 1.0 Adjustment layers, vector shapes, layer styles