Changelog

Site update — August 14, 2026 · Headlines in one color

Website only; no change to the app.

• The headline no longer fades from one color into another across the letters. A gradient poured through text is the house style of every generated landing page on the web, and it was on the hero here, on the small uppercase label above each section, and on the license label in the purchase panel. The words are one solid color now — the accent this page already used everywhere else — so the headline finally matches the page under it.
• The figures on the download-stats page were faded the same way and are plain white now. The color belongs to the bars beside them, not to the digits.
• Gradients are kept where they belong — the buttons, the app tile and the rule above the support panel are untouched. It is only text that stopped fading.
• No change to the app.

Download update — August 12, 2026 · Opens without an internet check

• The copy of Heftr in the download now opens without needing the internet. macOS checks that an app has been approved by Apple before it runs for the first time. That approval can travel inside the app itself, and in the download it did not — so the first launch had to reach Apple to confirm it. Offline, behind a hotel or campus login page, or when Apple’s service was slow, that check could fail and macOS would report that Heftr “cannot be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.” The approval now travels with the app, so the first launch works with no connection at all.
• Automatic updates were never affected — the copy they install already carried its approval.
• The installer window opens at the right size. It was one title bar too short, so the artwork behind the drag-to-Applications arrow was cut off along the bottom and the window opened already scrolled. It now fits exactly.
• The app itself is unchanged: same version, same signature. Only the download was repackaged, so there is nothing to do if you already have Heftr installed.

Site update — August 12, 2026 · How updating really works

• The update instructions were out of date. They described downloading a new copy and dragging it over the old one. Heftr updates itself — it checks about once a week and offers to install the new version in place, refusing any download that isn't signed by us. You can still replace it by hand, and you can turn the automatic check off.
• Nothing else changed. What this page already said about your files — that they are never uploaded, and that there is no account and no telemetry — was accurate and is unchanged.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 12, 2026 · Readable buttons and small print

• The buttons in the header say what they say. The Tip and Download pills were drawing their label at 55% opacity over a colored fill, which measured as low as 1.6:1 against it — well under the 4.5:1 the accessibility guidelines ask for. Their labels are now solid, and the fill behind them is set a shade deeper so the text genuinely clears that bar.
• The Subscribe and Support buttons too. Their labels were colored for one end of a two-color gradient and disappeared into the other end. Both now use a single fill that the label is legible on all the way across.
• The newsletter note, the “More apps” caption and the version line under the download button were all set too faint to read comfortably; each is now above the AA threshold.
• Keyboard shortcut chips are legible against their own background.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 11, 2026 · Clearer search results

• The description under this site in Google is no longer cut off. It ran past the length Google shows and broke mid-word; it now reads as a complete sentence.
• Sharing a link to the privacy, terms or changelog page now shows a proper preview card instead of a bare URL.
• The sitemap now reports when each page actually changed, so search engines re-check pages that have been updated instead of assuming they are stale.
• No change to the app.

August 11, 2026 · A new look

• Changed: Heftr has a new app icon. Every twoplus11 app moved to one generated palette, so the color in your Dock, on this site and on the download page is now the same color — they had drifted apart.
• Changed: refreshed the site to match, including the tab icon and the link preview image.

Site update — August 10, 2026 · Real screenshots of the app

• The product page illustrated the app with a hand-drawn mock-up of a window rather than showing Heftr itself. It now shows the running app: a file broken down into image data, metadata and overhead with exact byte sizes, the plain-English verdict, and a short animation of taking the one-click smaller copy. No change to the app.

1.1.9 — August 9, 2026 · Automatic updates

• New: Heftr updates itself. When a new version is out you get a prompt with the release notes and can install it in place — no more visiting the site and dragging a new copy over the old one. This is the last update you have to install by hand.
• New: refreshed appearance — Heftr now uses the shared twoplus11 palette and a regenerated app icon, so it matches the rest of the family.
• Fixed: contrast and keyboard-navigation problems (WCAG 2.1 AA) — faint text is now readable, and every control can be reached and used from the keyboard.
• Fixed: “Check for Updates” spins the button while it checks, instead of flashing an empty window.

1.1.8 — July 17, 2026 · 13 languages

• New: 13-language localization with an in-app flag picker — Heftr auto-detects your Mac's language, and you can override it anytime.
• Fixed: the "Compress to .zip" savings estimate now reflects the real output size, instead of extrapolating from just the first 8 MB (which could be wildly wrong on large files).

1.1.7 — July 16, 2026 · Appearance override fix

• Fixed: pinning the appearance to Light or Dark (instead of following the system) now restyles the whole window — previously the translucent header and footer kept the system's appearance, leaving hard-to-read text when the override and the system disagreed.

1.1.6 — July 15, 2026 · “Tip”

• Renamed the “Donate” link to “Tip.”

1.1.5 — July 15, 2026

• Refined the dark-mode Dock icon: now a true near-black, monochrome-style background with just a hint of teal, instead of a deeper tint of the same color.

1.1.4 — July 15, 2026

• Fixed: the app icon could show the wrong light/dark variant in Finder, Spotlight, Launchpad, and the Dock while Heftr wasn't running. It now updates everywhere immediately, not just the Dock tile of an already-open app.

1.1.3 — July 14, 2026

• New: the Dock icon now follows your Mac's light/dark appearance automatically — or pin it to Light or Dark from the new appearance toggle in the header.
• Fixed: the Dock icon rendered edge-to-edge with no padding, making it look larger than every other app in the Dock. It now follows Apple's standard icon grid, sized and spaced to match.

1.1.2 — July 13, 2026

• twoplus11 wordmark credit in the footer and update panel.
• Occasional, low-pressure prompt to support twoplus11 after extended use — never more than once, easy to dismiss for good.

1.1.1 — July 12, 2026

• New: clearer Help and Review buttons in the header, so support and feedback are one click away.

1.1.0 — July 11, 2026 · Fixes that work, and folders

• New: PDF shrink that actually works — the most common "why is this PDF huge" case (embedded photos) is now a one-click fix. Heftr downsamples the raster images to ~150 DPI via a Quartz image filter while text and vectors stay vector — never rasterized, so the copy is smaller but still crisp and selectable. It shows the projected size from a real dry-run and refuses gracefully when a PDF can't be shrunk safely (text-only, already efficient, or password-protected).
• New: Folder mode — a mini-DaisyDisk — drop a folder (or an .app) and get an interactive, fully accessible treemap of what's eating the space, biggest first, plus a ranked list and the biggest individual files anywhere in the tree. Click any block to drill in; a breadcrumb walks you back. The scan streams a live item count and never blocks the UI.
• New: Target-size mode — "get it under X MB" picks the gentlest fix intensity that still fits, for images, PDFs and Office/ZIP media, and tells you the projected result before writing. If the target can't be reached safely it says so and saves the smallest it could manage.
• New: Batch — drop several files at once to rank and compare them, drill into any one, and shrink every item that has a safe fix in one go.
• New: Copy report — one click copies a clean plain-text summary of any breakdown to the clipboard.
• Improved: PDF analysis now memory-maps the file instead of reading it whole, so even very large PDFs are inspected without ballooning memory.
• Improved: the Squishr hand-off now copies the file's path to the clipboard so it's one paste away.

1.0.0 — July 11, 2026 · Initial public release

The first release. Drop one file, see what's eating the bytes.

• The X-ray — drop any file and get a breakdown of exactly what's taking up space, a plain-English verdict, and a one-click smaller copy where it's safe. Every breakdown reconciles to the real on-disk size of the file.
• Office / ZIP (docx, xlsx, pptx, zip, epub) — members bucketed into Media, Fonts, XML/content, Embedded objects and archive overhead by on-disk size, with the single biggest member named. Working fix: re-encode oversized PNG/JPEG media (max 2048 px, quality 85) into a smaller copy — the document stays valid and the original is untouched.
• Images (jpg, png, heic, tiff) — byte-exact split of pixel data vs an embedded EXIF preview vs the ICC color profile vs metadata. Working fix: re-encode at quality 85 and strip the preview & metadata.
• PDF — stream-level accounting (Images / Fonts / Content streams / Document structure) from the raw bytes, with a precise recommendation.
• Video / audio (mp4, mov, m4v) — per-track Video vs Audio vs container overhead with a bitrate verdict, and a clean hand-off to Squishr for the actual re-encode.
• App bundles & folders — a size tree ranking the heaviest children (a mini-DaisyDisk), read-only.
• Anything else — a compressibility probe that tells you whether a .zip would help, with a one-click compress-to-zip fix.
• The bar — a genuinely beautiful segmented breakdown bar with a matching ranked list, live segment ⇄ row cross-highlighting, and per-segment tooltips. Light + dark, WCAG 2.1 AA, full keyboard navigation, respects reduced motion.
• Never modifies your original — every fix writes a (smaller) / (compressed) sibling copy alongside it.
• 100% local — nothing is uploaded; the only network calls are the optional license check and update check.
• Free for personal use; $5 business license. Silent weekly update check, in-app "Report an issue", and a gentle rating prompt.