Hands-On Mac 152 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Hands-On Mac how to bypass those very annoying constant screen recording screen access prompts in macOS Sequoia. Stay tuned Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Welcome back to Hands-on Mac. Today I want to show you a way to deal with an important feature in macOS Sequoia. Look, first I want to say this Apple's commitment to privacy and security is a great thing. Overall. It means that our systems are pretty locked down. But when you have a pretty locked down system here's the problem with that it's locked down. So that means you may get regular prompts asking you what would you like to do when it comes to this app? Do you want to give it your location? Do you want to give it to your photos? Love that, but to continue to get reminders over and, over and over again can get a little annoying. Today we're taking a look at a way to deal with ongoing prompts that give us permission to access or rather, they give apps permission to access your system, audio and your screen recording. So let's talk about this.

In previous versions of macOS, you had the ability to grant access from an app, say an application that is recording your screen and also recording your microphone, so you could do a voiceover. What would happen is, when it came time, you would get a prompt that says hey, I need to access your screen and be able to do what's called screen recording. Are you okay with that? You would say yes, and then that would be that Unless and until you made that change, that prompt would be done. You'd have it locked in In macOS Sequoia. Not only do you have the prompts to access your screen, you also have a separate prompt that is just for system audio recording. So now you can choose if an app gains access to your system audio. What's great about that is some apps in the past basically had one prompt for all of that, so whenever you gave it screen recording, really all it was trying to do was capture the system audio. This is now separated, so apps that just need to be able to access your system audio, that have no interest in what's on your screen, are able to ask for that independently.

But with the introduction of that came a new feature that I understand why it exists, but at the same time it's really frustrating for those of us who know what we're doing with our systems. Once a month, you will get prompted to re-grant permission for an app to have the ability to record what's on screen. Again, I get it. I understand why that's there so that you don't accidentally grant an app permission for that when you don't really want it to have permission to that after a period of time. Totally get it. So what do we do about this if we are someone who knows what the heck we're doing and we're tired of having the system prompt us to grant permission?

Well, there is a wonderful developer by the name of Jordy Bruin, as well as Antoine Vander Lee. Jordy Bruin makes a number of apps, including Mac Whisper for macOS that gives you access to the transcription tools from different AI platforms, and Jordy has created an app called Amnesia, along with Antoine. Again, this app is available completely for free, but it's a pay what you want, or what they call name a fair price app, and so you can go onto the link that will include in the show notes and you can choose what price you would like to pay. So it says name a fair price. It suggests, uh, four euros or more. Um, you can choose what you pay. You can pay nothing if you want to. Totally up to you. But what this is going to do is it's going to edit the app to give you the ability to say look, I don't want to be reminded to grant this app permission. So let's talk about what's involved here.

Well, some clever folks figured out that the way that Apple keeps track of when it comes time for an app to prompt you again for ongoing permission to record the window and record rather record your Mac screen and record the system audio. What they've done is they've added a little note to what's called a plist. A plist is a property list and it has a bunch of different properties for a specific application, of which one is. Now, when was the last time that your app has been prompted? When should this happen again? And so this app all it does is it goes in and it edits the plist file to push that date out way into the future. So if something like this kind of creeps you out, you don't want an app that's editing the plist file for other apps. Totally understand, this is not the app for you, but I thought I'd show you how it works.

So here we are on macOS and I've got the Amnesia app here. I'm going to open it up and the first thing it does is it just pops open the app itself. I'll double-click on the app and say yes, I'm okay with opening it, and it's going to immediately ask you can I have access to this section that they've discovered that has the plist file? You'll see it right here screencaptureapprovalsplist. I say open and what that does is it grants permission, and then it shows me what apps have asked for permission to access both the system itself and the system audio and the system video, and I can choose to disable reminders for that app.

So right now, on September 21st, I would have gotten a prompt asking me can I view your screen? For Ecamm, on the 19th, I would have received a prompt asking the same thing. For Setapp, it was asking me on the 25th. So for Display Link Manager, I'll choose Disable Reminders and now it's not going to ask me again until October 1st of 2124. That's so far in the future that I'm not worried about it. So now these apps that have asked permission to access both my video and my audio in the new way of things are no longer able to do so, and that is exactly what we want when it comes to making sure that we don't have to deal with this going through and annoyingly making a choice for whenever it comes time to prompt us.

So, again, it's something that is making a change to a plist file and that can be a little concerning for people Totally understand. So it may not be something for you, but if you are okay with the system being tweaked just a little bit, this app from Jordy Bruin, who is a trusted macOS developer, might be just a little utility for you to disable those prompts. If you've got a system that you, you know are, you're locked in, you're good, you know that these apps, these three apps, are trying to capture your screen, why do you need to keep getting reminded about it? That's how this can help Folks. That's going to bring us to the end of this episode of Hands on Mac. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you have questions, if you have topic suggestions, of course you can email me, micah, at twittv, and I'll catch you again next week for another episode of Hands on Mac. Bye-bye.