About

About Mojave Paint

During an extended stay at my California desert getaway I started building Mojave Paint. I've got all I need down there for effective macOS development — a 5K monitor, Starlink internet, and plenty of White Claw.

The concept for this really started in 2021, after leaving my second stint at Google. I had a vision for a web based image editor, something akin to Photopea but with a more unique look and feel. I spent a fair bit of time on that before losing interest and when I decided, in Februrary 2026, to start checking out these new AI coding tools, I thought why not revive the idea and this time as a native macOS Swift app.

The look and feel is obviously retro, but there is a rationale behind much of this. The hard edged 1x graphics communicate precision, hand placed pixels being the complete opposite of the smeared/averaged uncanny AI look. There is no dark mode. Most apps have dark mode and light mode, but light mode is retina burning bright and there is no goldilocks mode. I call the Mojave Paint theme "toasted light mode". With an image editor, I believe it's important to keep a neutral amount of light coming in from around the document. Not black, not white, but neutral medium. Think of how when watching TV at night it's nice to have a lamp on near the television.

These are just some of the many ways that Mojave Paint is crafted with love and passion. I hope you like it, and, give it some leeway for not being all that complete just yet.

-John
April 2, 2026

Tech specs

This site is SvelteKit hosted on EC2 behind CloudFront. Bootstrap for grid layout.

I get a certain pleasure in building such a full-featured application on such low end resources. My dev machines are an original M1 Mac Mini ($599) and an original M1 MacBook Air ($999), while this site runs on an an EC2 micro instance that costs me like $10/month.