Four new features, each exercised against a real block device.
Compressed images — write straight from .xz, .gz, .zip and .bz2 without unpacking first. Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian and OpenWrt all ship this way; unpacking by hand costs twice the disk space and an extra step. Decompression runs in flow, block by block, and nothing intermediate touches the disk. .xz uses Apple's Compression framework, which reads the container under the LZMA algorithm — no dependency on the xz binary, which macOS does not ship. The expanded size comes from the archive's own index, so the progress bar stays honest.
Checksum verification — paste a SHA-256, or the whole contents of a SHA256SUMS file and Bootsmith finds the line matching your image. A corrupt ISO writes without complaint and only reveals itself in front of the server.
Restore the drive — after receiving an ISO, a stick is unreadable to Finder, which offers only to initialize it. One menu reformats it as exFAT or FAT32 and gives the stick back.
Drives appear on their own — no more clicking Refresh, plus a warning when the selected disk is large enough to be an external drive rather than a USB stick.
Tested: the same image written from all four formats produces byte-identical results on the device, with exact expanded size and boot mode read through the decompression.
Install
brew install --cask mesquitadev/tap/bootsmith
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Bootsmith.app