What’s next for Gifox – a note from founders

[iby]

trafficstars

Hello friends, Ian here – founder and original developer behind Gifox. If you’re already using the app or just considering it, this post is for you.

The past year was not very productive for Gifox, but it was enormously productive for our team – we’ve been crazy-busy (24/6 kind of crazy) with another project, and now that it’s finally kicking off, we can resume our normal (24/5 kind of normal) pace! 🥲

I’ve always had a bigger vision for Gifox and want to use this opportunity to give the app more time and attention it deserves. So I want to share what’s coming up for Gifox later in 2025, and what it all means for the project and for our users. I’d also love to connect with anyone who wants to share ideas or feedback – let’s make Gifox great again!

🛠️ Behind-the-scenes maintenance.

Gifox launched 9 years ago, and some early decisions left behind technical debt that still haunts us today – working on the app sometimes feels clunky, creating mental friction when adding new features or changes. Tidying up these loose ends will speed up development and make it more enjoyable again. Most of this work is already done and won’t impact the real plans outlined below.

✨ General UI and UX improvements.

Gifox still uses the original UI, created long before we knew how the app would evolve. It clearly stood the test of time, but as more and more changes stack up over time, some parts start to look inconsistent, others become outdated, and a few are not making sense anymore.

We took a step back and revised the entire interface from the ground up with functionality and simplicity in mind. Moving forward, this gives us a solid foundation for building new features and improvements, without layering them on top of old issues.

We’re starting by tidying up the overall UI, reviewing layouts, fine-tuning icons, and other quick visual enhancements. Next, we want to improve onboarding, better organize preferences, add a global progress indicator in the status bar, and explore better ways to manage the library. All of this will make the user experience smoother and more intuitive.

🎥 Better recording and import control.

Recording and creating GIFs is the core feature of Gifox, and it needs some improving. Customizing how mouse and keyboard interactions (presses, clicks, scrolls, and swipes) are captured is our most requested feature, and that’s what we plan to do first. After that, we want to look into snappy selection to support pixel-perfect window selection in free-area mode.

Next on the list is revising the import of image sequences, especially shorter ones – the current implementation misses cases where users need to create a very slow, few-frame GIF, and there’s no good way to control timing for these shorter GIFs.

✂️ Better editing support.

Editing is Gifox’s second major feature that also needs some attention. Not being able to see a live preview when splitting or trimming a track drives 9 out of 10 users crazy – this is the first thing we need to address. Next, we plan to add annotation and redacting support, including text and shape drawing, and blurring sensitive parts on a track. After that, it would be great to have basic track effects like reverse or bounce playback, speed adjustment, and transitions.

📤 Reinventing the sharing.

Quick and easy GIF sharing was another cornerstone of the app. I was a big proponent of using native integrations with file-sharing services instead of building and maintaining our own backend. It all worked as expected at the start, but maintaining these integrations quickly became a huge burden as they constantly kept breaking due to updates and rate limits. Recent changes by Google and Dropbox put the final nail in the coffin, so we’ve decided to pause further work on this until we come up with a more reliable approach.

As a short-term solution, we plan to utilize standard macOS sharing APIs to support 3rd-party integrations like we did before. But ideally, we want Gifox to provide instant shareable links after recording or importing a GIF, with no waiting for processing and uploading. Long term, we’re exploring other options, like building a separate open-source sharing service that users can easily host and connect with their own storage, whether that’s S3 or something else.

---

These are the immediate priorities we want to check off the backlog, with more improvements to follow after. I hope this gives a better idea of where Gifox is heading and what to expect in the near future. And again, if you have any feedback or thoughts, I’d genuinely love to hear them!

I. ✌️