Black Out is a macOS app that lets you quickly hide sensitive parts of an image. This can be useful when you want to post a screenshot or photo on the web that contains some information you don't want revealed.
I often post screenshots on Twitter and sometimes I need to hide some private information. I could fire up Pixelmator or Photoshop, but it feels overkill, and they don't remove metadata. This app is a single-purpose app to make the task super easy. You can read more about the development process in my blog post.
Answers to some common questions:
Can you support blurring and pixelation?
Blurring and pixelation are intentionally not supported as they can sometimes be reversed. The only reliable way to redact something is to put a black box over it.
I can already do this in the Preview app!
You can do this in any graphics app. The point of this app is to make it super easy to do. Most graphics apps, like Preview, Pixelmator, and Photoshop, preserve metadata, which means you could accidentally leak information like the capture location. Black Out strips out all metadata.
Does it support PDF?
You can open a PDF document, but you have to export it as a PNG image. It’s almost impossible to reliably export redacted PDFs.
Black Out is my 5th macOS app this year. Previous ones are Battery Indicator, Touch Bar Simulator, Lungo, and HEIC Converter. I started learning macOS app development and Swift at the beginning of the year. My goal is to do 6 macOS apps in 2017 to get better at Swift and learn to ship. I plan to do a beta launch of my 6th app, Shareful, very soon.
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