The last changelog I posted was May 2nd, for v1.0.55. That’s three and a half months of silence on a product that was shipping the whole time.
I’d rather be honest about why: I ran out of ideas.
Not out of work — v1.0.57, v1.0.60, v1.0.61 and v1.0.62 all went out during that stretch. But none of them had a headline. They were microphone rewrites, permission cleanups, zoom timing fixes. The kind of thing that makes the app better to use and impossible to announce. Writing “the mic no longer drops out when you unplug your headphones” as a launch post felt worse than saying nothing, so I said nothing and kept fixing things.
That’s the backlog below. And then there’s the reason I’m posting again: the next release records your iPhone and iPad. It’s built and I’m testing it now — more on that at the end.
What shipped while it was quiet
v1.0.57 — May 13
Recording target overlay. Region and window recordings now draw a live border around exactly what’s being captured while you record. No more finishing a five-minute take and discovering the region was 40px off.
May 14–15
Two fewer permissions. Keystroke capture used to run on a CGEvent tap, which meant asking for Input Monitoring and carrying a HID sandbox exception. That whole layer is gone — hotkey overlays now run on standard event monitors. Fewer scary permission dialogs on first launch, same feature.
AfterCut has a Dock icon again. It used to be menu-bar-only, which meant no icon in the Dock and no entry in the app switcher. Enough people told me they couldn’t find the app after launching it that I changed it.
Menu bar icon visibility improvements, and a crash removed from the recording island.
v1.0.60 — May 18
Zoom timing rework. The zoom-out trigger fires at a better moment, overlapping zoom sections no longer fight each other, and the pan path builder handles speed-adjusted segments correctly. If auto-zoom ever felt like it was pulling out a beat too early, this is the fix.
v1.0.61 — June 14
The microphone rewrite. Three separate passes over the mic capture path across June. Audio errors that killed a recording mid-take, and — the big one — device switching. Plug in headphones, unplug them, switch to AirPods halfway through a take: the capture session now follows along instead of silently going dead.
v1.0.62 — August 11
Workspace. You can now sign in to an AfterCut account from inside the app. That gets you organizations, license keys bound to your team instead of one machine, and a real page for your cloud recordings on the web — share links, password protection, view and play counts, and timestamped comments from whoever you sent the link to.
Auto Level for quiet recordings. Nothing in the capture chain applies gain, so a built-in or USB mic that runs 15–25 dB below full scale produces an export that sounds like a whisper. The Audio tab now has an Auto Level button: it measures the actual speech level of your track — silence and room tone excluded — and applies the makeup gain that brings it to a normal speaking level, capped so peaks never clip. The mic volume slider also runs to 400% now if you’d rather do it by hand.
Fixed: clicking Stop twice crashed the app. Certain camera and device previews could hang the UI for several seconds while attaching. Both gone.
All of that is in the current build. If you’re running AfterCut, you already have it.
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Coming in September: record your iPhone and iPad
Here’s the headline I didn’t have in June.
The next release adds Device as a recording source, sitting in the menu bar panel right next to Screen, Window, and Region.
Plug an iPhone or iPad into your Mac with a USB cable, tap Trust on the device, and it appears in the picker with a live preview. Hit record. That’s the whole setup — no simulator, no QuickTime detour, no exporting from your phone and dragging the file across.
What it captures:
- Native device resolution, portrait or landscape — rotation handled automatically
- Your facecam and microphone alongside it, exactly like a screen recording, so mobile demos can still have a talking head in the corner
- Devices unplugged mid-session stop cleanly instead of hanging the app
One thing I want to be clear about up front: the audio comes from your Mac’s microphone, not the device. You’re narrating over the phone screen, not capturing the phone’s own audio output.
Everything else still works
This is the part I care about most. A device recording won’t be a second-class project type — it’s a normal AfterCut project:
- Auto-zoom follows the action
- Captions transcribe your narration
- Annotations blur anything sensitive on screen, spotlight a region, or drop a note
- Backgrounds, padding, corner radius, shadows
- 9:16 export for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok — which, for a phone recording, is finally the aspect ratio you actually wanted
I’m targeting September for the release. If you want to try it before then, email me and I’ll send you a build.
About the next three months
I don’t want to repeat the last stretch. The honest problem is that I build what I’d use myself, and I’d already built most of that — so the ideas have to come from somewhere else now.
If there’s something you keep working around in AfterCut, or a recording you can’t make with it today, tell me. The roadmap and feature board is open, and both “Record more” and the teleprompter shipped because someone posted there. You can also just email support@aftercut.studio.
Full release history lives on the changelog.