Learn about the Setapp service with Aric Pedersen.
A free month of Setapp: https://go.setapp.com/invite/aric3
Full transcript:
Aric • 00:02
Welcome to the March 2026 PMUG podcast. Tonight we’re talking about Setapp. Let’s get into it.
Michael • 00:14
Hello everyone. You know me as PMUG’s webmaster and the one who updates PMUG social media accounts. My day job is a website designer for a small website design firm in Princeton. Unfortunately for me at work, business has been down and my boss can only afford to have me working part-time, so I’m looking for a new job. If you know of any business or organization that needs a webmaster, website designer, graphics designer, or social media manager, could you please get in touch with me? Even remote work is fine. Here’s my contact information and I’ll also put my contact information into the Zoom chat window. Let me share my screen. Here we go. Share. Yep. So here’s my contact information, and I’ll put this into the chat. Thank you. And now back to Aric.
Aric • 01:04
Okay. Well, before we get started, I’m going to go ahead and post a link to a PDF that is going to contain all of the links to things that I’m going to discuss today. It also has a list of all of the apps that are in the service we’re going to be talking about. So if you’re curious, you can look there. I will post this again towards the end of the meeting in case anybody comes in late, because usually there’s at least a few people who do. And as always, we are recording tonight. So if you don’t want to appear on screen, please turn off your video and keep yourself muted if you’re not asking a question. This way, if your dog barks or whatever, we don’t have to hear that. Okay. I am going to go ahead and share my screen and we’ll get started. Okay. So I’m going to share that one. Okay. All right. That one. There we go. Okay. So everybody should now see my screen here. So what we’re talking about today is a service called Setapp. It’s been around for years now. So this is not a brand new service. I subscribed to it some time ago because I realized rather quickly the number of apps that are in there that I would use more than outweighs the cost for the service. So I wanted to present to everyone so that you have a chance to try it out for yourself if you haven’t already. So what is Setapp? Well, its main feature is it’s a subscription service that grants you access to over 270 different pieces of software for the Mac and iOS. It’s not available for Windows or Linux. So for once, it pays to be a Mac user. Basically, that’s their key feature is this subscription service. But they do also let you rent single applications for a set price each month from their marketplace here on their website. To be honest with you, given the cost of the Setapp service, I’m not sure why anybody would want to spend, you know, almost as much just for one of these apps. But you can do that if you just want to rent an application for a month. It may be a little bit cheaper to do it that way. But that’s not going to be the main focus of tonight. We’ll actually talk about their subscription service. So unlike most subscription software, basically you pay Setapp one price and it gives you access to all of the software in the Setapp service for every device that you have registered. So as with most subscriptions, if you stop paying, all of the apps will stop working. But anything you generated with them is still yours to keep. You obviously just can’t use those apps to re-edit what you’ve made after you stop paying. The nice thing about Setapp is you don’t have to worry about, you know, the cost of the service. Because one price gets you everything. So you can install or uninstall any of the software at any time using the Setapp service. That sort of runs in the background. which is sort of a combination of a store of sorts, showcasing all of the apps that they have available. And also it acts as an installer and upgrader for the software that you have installed, and also an uninstaller. So you can sort of think of it like Steam, if you’ve ever played games through Steam. But instead of focusing on games, it focuses on productivity software. The apps included in the Setapp subscription are the full versions of commercial software that is also available to buy separately outside of Setapp, so you can still go and buy all of these apps that are part of Setapp separately directly from the developers if you want to do so. If you subscribe to Setapp, you also get all major updates, major and minor updates for no additional charge for as long as the app is part of the Setapp service you also don’t have to worry about any serial numbers uh the Setapp service itself uh acts as a sort of the serial number you do periodically need internet access so that Setapp can confirm that you still have an active subscription to set up but you don’t need internet access all the time. So you can use it offline for quite some time before it starts, you know, warning you that it needs to check in. So long as the app is installed and you have Setapp active, then you’re good to go. Setapp has a wide variety of apps that you can use. So you’re almost certain to find some stuff that you’ll be interested in. Actually, several of the apps that are included in Setapp actually cost more than the base subscription price if you were to buy them separately. So it is actually a pretty good deal if you don’t mind a subscription. There are about 20 of the 270 or so apps that use AI features from the cloud. So use ChatGPT, Anthropic, Claude, et cetera. And those apps that don’t use free local AI models use sort of a credit system that is built into Setapp. So these credits are used instead of paying separately ChatGPT for access to their service. So you buy credits through Setapp and you use those those credits are only used when you use a cloud-based AI service that one of these apps requires all setup plans come with at least 10 AI credits a month but you can pay more per month or per year to get up to 250 credits every single month I will note that unused credits don’t carry over so that you should only buy the credits you are pretty sure you’re going to use. I honestly recommend that you don’t start with a plan that has more than 10 AI credits because you can upgrade to more credits at any time but I would actually you know see if you’re going to use it before before you bother. Like I said you get 10 10 credits a month to use those services so you can certainly try it out and see if it’s something you want to spend more money on or not and again those credits have nothing to do like all of the software that’s part of set up still works this is just because the third party cloud AI providers have a have their own system so every time you use their service, you have to pay them. And so Setapp, that’s how Setapp manages it. In addition to the Mac, there’s also a Setapp service for iOS apps, but that is managed both on your Mac or via the web and your iOS device. I’ll explain a bit how this works later. But basically what you’ll do is you scan a QR code with your iOS device. And when you scan this special QR code with the iOS device, it basically logs you into Setapp on the web and then sends a special token to the iOS software that you have installed on your phone and then activates it so that you don’t have to pay for it outside of the Setapp service, what you’re paying for the Setapp service. So it’s a little bit weird, but it does work. So Setapp can be a great way to try a lot of different software to find the things that work best for your needs. I’ll be honest with you, there’s a lot of software that I would never have expected that I would use on a fairly regular basis. And Setapp has made it easy for me to try out. You know, even if it’s software that I don’t use all that often, but I use once or twice, you know, every few months or something, it’s more than worth it. And I don’t have to worry about having to buy it or upgrade it or do anything like that. So even if you don’t like the concept of renting your software, you can still use Setapp for a month or so. Find the apps that you like to use. find the ones that you think are worth buying separately, and then go buy them directly from the developers. Okay. I will answer questions here in a moment. Okay. So let’s talk about the downsides. So a potential downside for using the Setapp service is if an app happens to get removed from the Setapp service, which has happened in the past, you will no longer have access to install that application. However, if you have the app already installed on your Mac through said app, you can continue to use the installed version for as long as it continues to work. You just won’t be able to reinstall it if you remove it, and you won’t get upgrades to newer versions. They don’t immediately delete the app from your Mac. Thankfully, there have been very few apps that have ever left the service, almost all of them. Once they get added, they stick around. In fact, I can only think of maybe two apps that got removed, and one of them got removed by Setapp itself. Another nice thing about Setapp is apps automatically get updated in the background. You don’t have to worry about installing the updates. they just set up takes care of it for you transparently. It will let you know when there are updates, etc. In fact, you can even have it show you when you launch an app, hey, this app has been updated since the last time you launched it, and here’s the new things that have gotten added to the app since the last time you used it. You don’t have to have that pop up if you don’t want to know. You can just periodically go into the Setapp service and they have notifications to let you know which apps you’re using and which ones have been upgraded. So it’s entirely up to you. Okay. So let’s talk about, let me go over here and let’s talk about the price. So Setapp costs $9.99 a month for a single Mac. And it costs $12.49 for one Mac and four iOS devices. Then if you want even more than that, you can pay, this is the best deal, $14.99 for four Macs and four iOS devices. All of these plans come with 10 AI credits a month for no additional charge. It’s interesting. I have been a Setapp customer for a fair amount of time. When they first launched, this $10 a month actually gave you access to two Macs instead of one. They’ve let me keep that. I pay the annual equivalent for one Mac and I get two Macs instead. But you can upgrade at any point. You’re not locked in. So if you decide you want to add an extra Mac later, you can purchase an upgrade. And then you can also save some money if you know you’re going to use the service by purchasing annually. So we switch this over here. And this is the equivalent of what you pay per month, except that you pay upfront the entire amount. So one Mac costs $107.88 for a year. If you want one Mac and four iOS devices, it’s $137.88. And then four Macs and four iOS devices is $161.88. And once again, you get 10 AI credits a month. Even if you purchase annually, you only get 10 credits a month and they don’t carry over. So every month you’ll get a new supply of 10 credits with these plans.
Michael • 14:48
Pardon me, Aric. Khürt has a question in the chat. What’s the security and privacy posture of the service?
Aric • 14:56
Well, they have a fairly robust privacy policy. But given the way the Setapp service works, which is Setapp, most subscription services like this, They take a little bit of money off the top because, you know, they handle payment processing and that costs money, etc. But all of the developers sort of share a pool of the money that has come in for that month. And the way it works is this. They pay based on who actually has your software installed and, you know, is using it. So they do keep track anonymously of who is installing applications and who’s using them. But they do not keep that, you know, in an identifiable way. They anonymize the data. But that’s basically, so they report it to the developers like, hey, there’s, you know, 423 people using your app. And so you get out of the pool of profits this month, you get X amount of dollars. It’s apparently a pretty good deal, even though $10 a month isn’t a lot per user. There are quite a lot of users on this service, so it adds up quickly. So like I said, there’s not much churn, so it must be pretty good. Okay, and then if you want to add AI credits over the 10 you get per month, the price goes up a bit. So for the AI plans, they start at $14.99 a month for one Mac, and you get 125 credits a month for that. For $23.99, you get four Macs with 250 credits a month. And then if you want to pay annually for those credits, you can pay $161.88 for one Mac with 125 credits, which is 1,500 credits annually, or $259.08 for four Macs with 250 credits a month, or a grand total of 3,000 credits annually. So as a bonus for you guys, normally you’d get a free one-week trial of SAT app. If you sign up now, you’d get one free week to try it out before you have to pay. But in the PDF that I provided and in the chat, I am going to paste in a special link for everyone to use if you want to. Using that link, if you sign up for Setapp, you get a full month of free service, so you don’t have to pay a dime for a whole month. So you can really kick the tires and decide if this is something that is for you or not before you start paying the money. Honestly, a week is fine, but that’s barely enough time to sort of really get used to what the service can do for you. So, you know, I recommend people use the link. to get a free month, but I do have to give a disclaimer. If you sign up through this link and you stay a paid member, I will also get a free month of service at some point, though that doesn’t cost you personally anything. But if you don’t want that, you can just go to setapp.com and avoid that and sign up for a seven-day free trial instead. Okay, let’s see. Questions.
Jim • 18:53
I’ve got one. When you were talking about the numbers, it didn’t seem like the screen had the same information. Now, it could be I was far enough behind in reading from what you were saying that I messed up. But the AI ad is like $9.99 a month. So you’re talking about a total of about $20 a month if you wanted 20 credits on a single Mac. Is that what that means?
Aric • 19:21
No. So the AI plus plans, they just give you access to more credits than you would normally get. And so there are two, they call them AI enthusiast, which is one Mac, you get 125 credits instead of just 10.
Jim • 19:38
Okay.
Aric • 19:39
And then there’s AI expert here, which is 250 credits per month for four Macs and four iOS devices.
Jim • 19:50
You don’t get the extra credits for if you have iOS devices unless you go to that power user kind of thing.
Aric • 19:58
Right, right. So, like, for example, I turned off the AI. It’s a little confusing the way they have it set up here, but my numbers are correct, the ones that I read out. Power user here, this is just for 4 Max and 4 iOS.
Jim • 20:11
This comes with 10 credits total per month.
Aric • 20:15
And that’s, this is the annual price. This is the not annual price. So if you pay month to month, it’s basically $15 a month. If you purchase it annually, then you basically are paying $13.49 a month, except that you’re paying for the entire year up front. And then if you want the extra credits, you have to go over here. Because this one right here where it just says Mac, that’s actually one of the, this is just this same plan. This one over here that says Mac. Yeah, that doesn’t change when you switch this over. These are the only two AI extra credit plans. Like I said, for the most part, you really don’t need, unless you’re going to use a lot of the AI features, the cloud-based AI features, you don’t need it. So like I said, I wouldn’t bother getting them up front. Start with the 10 credits, and then when you get close, feel free to upgrade to, because you can upgrade at any point. through Setapp, even in the middle of a month, if you want to add additional AI credits.
Jim • 21:25
And this is the only way. So somebody that weirdly perhaps wanted to use more than 250 credits or more than 10 credits on iOS devices can’t use Setapp to get their usage.
Aric • 21:40
Actually, you can. My understanding is that if you need more than the 250 credits, the reason they offer 250 credits is because very few users ever go past that. But if you need more, you can basically contact Setapp, and you just ask them, you know, hey, I need whatever it is, like 500 credits a month or, you know, whatever your usage is, and they will give you a custom link to pay for the amount of credits that you want.
Jim • 22:13
Okay. This was your original screen, but on an annual save 10% basis.
Aric • 22:22
Right, yeah. So this is the month-to-month plans here.
Jim • 22:27
Okay. Okay.
Aric • 22:29
And then if we switch over here, they don’t show you the total price. A lot of services do that now. So they just show you, oh, here’s what your monthly spend would be, even though you’re spending that up front. Essentially, you’re paying for 12 months at $9 a month instead of $10 a month for one Mac. And then the other plans are similar. But like I said, if you sign up through that link that I gave, you will be able to use it for a month before you have to worry about paying. Except for if you need more AI credits. And the reason for that is because they, like Setapp actually has to pay, you know, like chat GPT, et cetera, for all of the usage, so.
Khürt • 23:22
– All right. So Setapp, the mobile part of Setapp shut down recently. And there’s another one called Bodega that shut down in 2016. And just a few years ago, I had the Mac update the service and that shut down in 2021. How much do you know about Setapp in terms of their financial stability?
Aric • 23:50
– Well, here’s the thing. They’re not a publicly traded company, so I can’t give you specifics. However, I will say this, Setapp has been around for at least, I don’t know, probably eight years now at least. And it hasn’t changed. They’ve added new apps since I first signed up. But other than that, it hasn’t really changed, which I do know that the company behind it, Macpaw is a, they’re, the owners are from the Ukraine. My understanding is that they’ve moved for reasons. But they have said that they are financially stable, that there’s no issues with the service. And I mean, yeah, it’s always possible that a service, any service, any software developer could go out of business at any point. And then you’re sort of left, you know, trying to figure out what you’re going to do. When you’re talking about a subscription service like this, it gets a little bit more dicey because if they were to shut down, I’m not sure how they would handle, you know, people who, you know, have the apps installed. But I assume it would probably work like it does right now, which is once they can confirm that you’re a set-up client, as long as you have the app installed, it’ll continue to work. So I would imagine they would do something like that. And like I said, they’ve been around for many years now, so they don’t give me the impression of a company that is having issues. They are a software developer themselves, and they put all of their software into the Setapp service. We’ll talk about some of them tonight. But yeah, their stuff is actually expensive, their software. They charge a lot of money for most of it. So like I said, they seem very, very happy with the service.
Khürt • 26:01
I’ll take my enterprise hat off now.
Aric • 26:04
No, it’s all right. That’s a fair question. Nobody wants to have a service like this just sort of yanked out from under them. And there’s always a risk. But as far as I can tell, like I said, it’s been around for a long time now. And, you know, the war in Ukraine has been going on for a long time, and that hasn’t seemed to affect them. So I think we’re pretty safe. Okay, let me see if there are other questions here. Okay. All right. We answered that. We talked about the AI credits. Okay, so Joe, we’re gonna, he asks, what are some of the nicer Mac apps available in Zed app? And I’m going to get to that right now. In addition, the link that I provided earlier, just go ahead and paste that in there again. That has a list of all of the apps that are part of the service that aren’t iOS only. So there are, I think, like 10 apps that are like iOS only that aren’t in that list, but everything else is listed there. And it tells you about each one of them. And honestly, none of the software that’s in there is like, you know, shovelware, if you know what I mean, created just to basically fill up a spot. It’s all good quality software from real developers who have been making Mac apps for a long time. This isn’t cheap stuff. But I will talk about my favorites here shortly. Let me launch Setapp here. This is the Setapp service. This is actually the storefront that shows you all of the apps that you have access to. Obviously, they show you recent updates and other interesting little tidbits to try to get you to try some of the software. And again, anything you see here, if you want to try it out for a few minutes, just to see if it’s something you might like, it’s very easy. So let’s say, for example, I’m interested in this Find Files Faster item here, HudaSpot. So HudaSpot’s been around for a long time. This is not new software. It’s been around for many, many years, long before Spotlight was a thing and it has only gotten better but think of it like a an even more in-depth version of spotlight to help you find stuff that it you know apps etc and launch them that are on your Mac and so if you’re interested in it I can just click install here and then you know it’ll go ahead and install it in the background and then I can click open and here’s who to spot and I can start using it okay and then you know I can go in here and change the settings and play around with it the nice thing about set up also is they have a lot of articles where they talk about the apps that are in the service so you can see how people people use them and get a sense of this sort of stuff. Now, if I try this out for a while and I decide it’s not for me, I can just go ahead and close it down. Then if I want to uninstall it, I just go back here to Setapp service and go to uninstall. Then it says, do you want to remove the application completely, or do you want to just leave your preferences in place and remove the application itself? Now this is nice because if it’s something like, you know, if you, if you spend a lot of time setting up the service and you don’t really want to have it installed on your Mac right now, but you might want to come back to it later. Just removing the application is probably what you want to do. And that’ll keep, if you ever reinstall it in the future, it’ll keep all of your, your previous settings if you do it that way. But since I’m not using it right now, I’m just going to go ahead and click uninstall completely. And then I have to enter super secret, top secret password. And then let’s go over here. And then that’s it. The item is completely uninstalled. If this is a piece of software that you really love and want to keep track of, you can click this heart over here. And that basically just notes to the service that like, hey, this is one of your favorites. And it’ll always appear here in the favorites. So if you want to reinstall it later, you can quickly get to it. Or if you, for example, register another Mac on the service, any of these favorited items will appear in your favorites so that you can very quickly install the ones that you know you like. Then over here, we have the overall rating from actual Setapp users. If you’ve tried the app yourself, you can rate it here, but it’ll tell you like, hey, you need to have this installed if you want to rate it because they don’t want people who’ve actually used the product on Setapp to be able to rate it. It’s gotten a really positive set of reviews here. You can read more about it down here and here, some of the common reviews. If you click “See All”, you’ll see all of the people who have left written reviews of the software. It also links to the developer and their various policies, including a privacy policy, terms of use, etc. That I’m sure will make Khürt very happy. Then they always show you some pictures of the software so that you can understand what it looks like before you go ahead and install it. Let me go over here. There is a special Setapp folder that gets created inside your inside of your applications folder. This contains all of the Setapp software that you have currently installed. It’s all in one place inside one folder. It’s actually nice they put it inside a separate folder because you can keep your other software. In fact, if you want, You can even install, if, for example, you happen to have a paid version of software that also is part of Setapp. So, for example, I previously had purchased TechSniper, not through Setapp. This was before they were on Setapp. I had purchased it directly from them. So I can keep that version installed on my Mac and still, you know, have the setup version if I really want to. And I can switch between the two different versions if that’s something that I want. It does not replace any of your existing software that is installed on your Mac. It just sort of installs in its own special location. So, okay, let me go back over here. Okay, now, one of the things that you need to understand is that with 270 apps in here, there are some pieces of software that seem to duplicate functionality. Like there is more than one application that is capable of taking screenshots. Now, why would they have multiple apps that have that functionality? Well, because they’re all very different. The way that they focus on taking screenshots, the features that they add, etc., are very different. And so they don’t have like, there’s not like 15 different apps that do the same thing, but there may be one or two or in some cases three that have some overlap with other pieces of software so that you can try them out and decide which one works better for you because just because one person likes a particular screenshot app doesn’t mean that that’s the one you’re going to like. There is more than one calculator application. There’s a NUMI and Solver, and they approach the process of calculation in different ways. So while they get the same work done, they don’t work the same way. So I actually kind of appreciate that there is not for all of this stuff, but for the really popular things, there’s often more than one thing that can accomplish what you want. So you can find the one that works best for you. Okay. All right. So let’s see here. Pretty good here. We did that. Okay. Before I get into the apps that I personally use and can’t live without, I wanted to answer a couple of questions that has come up. So Khürt mentioned that said app has done a good job of cloning the look and feel of the iOS app store. Yeah, it’s a very Mac-like feeling application. And so it is somewhat different. Honestly, because Setapp is already a paid service, there’s no advertisements like there are in the iOS store, which always kind of bothered me, but it is what it is. So Setapp, everything you see here is here because it’s part of the service. They have various how-tos here, so you can click through and see people’s articles where they talk about the different apps, how they use them, and that sort of thing. As you install software and use it, Setapp will locally learn about you. This is not something they share with other people. But the Setapp application will make recommendations for things it thinks you might like based on other stuff that you have installed. and so they’re not wrong a lot of this stuff is very good and to be honest with you like i said there’s a lot of interesting software here i haven’t run across any crap so this is all good quality stuff but if you are not sure where to get started they do have collections which are they you know people have gone through and put together like you know certain types of apps that people tend to use together and created sort of a like a starter kits for various tools so you can very quickly install all of these apps that are part of the particular collection or you can just install individually one of them if you don’t want all of them but it’s a good place to get started if you uh if you aren’t sure and then these app guides uh talk in depth about the products what they are capable of doing for you um and you can read that before you uh you get started um you know so you just click on one of these and it’ll tell you about about the application and what it does and how it does it with you know little animated uh gifs here of the service so you can get a sense of stuff before you even install it but because it manages the installation and uh and removal for you uh it makes it really easy to try stuff out and then get rid of it uh if stuff if there’s stuff that you don’t want they do very often add new stuff so every month or two there’s probably a new new piece of software that gets added. So this is the new arrivals section down here. So you can quickly see stuff that may have come recently that you haven’t tried before. So you can check it out. And they also have recently updated in case you’re interested in seeing what new features may get added to pieces of software. Maybe that you don’t have currently installed to see if that app that you were kind of interested in but aren’t using, maybe it’s added new features that you particularly like and now are interested in using it you know more regularly okay and so Jim says how many apps have geographical limitations there are none if you get set up you get all of the apps worldwide the only place that they the only places that they won’t sell Setapp into are the places that have worldwide embargoes. So like if you live in Russia or Iran, North Korea, those kinds of places, then you’re out of luck. But outside of that, if you subscribe to the Setapp service, you get all of the apps.
Jim • 40:02
And you can take your Mac or iOS device anywhere in the world and continue using them?
Aric • 40:08
Yes, yep, doesn’t matter. Okay, and so starting the apps, you wanted to know if you have to start them from the launcher here. You do not, you can just start them from the finder like normal. So if something’s not currently running and you wanna fire it up, you can just double click it and it’s just like any other application, except that it doesn’t pester you to register it because it already knows that it’s registered because it’s part of the Setapp service. So yeah, it works just like any other application that’s on your Mac. The only difference is, as I mentioned, periodically you will need internet access to confirm that your Setapp service is still active, but you do not need constant internet access unless the app itself requires that. So, you know, if it’s an AI service that uses entirely the third-party cloud AI, well, then you’re gonna need internet access for that the entire time you’re using the app, because that’s how the app works. But you don’t need it just for said app, all the time anyway.
Khürt • 41:27
– And Aric, I don’t remember who asked the question about where can you use it. when you say only the countries that are embargoed. So anywhere else in the world, like literally anywhere else in the world, I can go and use that app.
Aric • 41:42
– Yeah, you can travel anywhere where you can get internet access and use those. And in fact, you can use those apps for a while without internet access. But if you’re gonna be, let’s say you’re gonna be in, I don’t know, England for a month. At some point you will need internet access so that Setapp can check in and make sure that you still have an active subscription.
Khürt • 42:05
I was thinking more along the line of, if I decide to go on safari in Kenya and I’m gone for a couple of weeks, there’s no internet access at all on safari. If I need to, if there’s one of the apps that does like photo editing, do I need to, is there an issue there at all?
Aric • 42:25
Well, what I would do is before you go, make sure that you connect to that app you know, on the internet before you leave, make sure you launch that app, make sure that you launch the apps that you’re interested in using so that they are fully up to date with like, okay, yes, you have an active Setapp service, et cetera. But yeah, if it’s a couple of weeks, it’s not gonna be a problem. And for the most part, they’ll continue to work normally even without internet access. Except like I said, for those apps that require some kind of internet access to do what they do. Because you can’t help that. But yeah, Setapp won’t yank it out from under you. But if you’re going to be gone for a month or more, you’re going to need internet access at some point to use those apps. But it doesn’t have to be for very long. You just basically need to launch the Setapp service, connect to the internet, so that the Setapp service can be like, oh, yep, we’re still good. And then you’re good to go. It’s not like you have to, you know, spend an hour on the internet.
Khürt • 43:33
So not like Adobe, which will cut you off and be just optical. And then you have all these photos and you can’t edit them because the software’s not working.
Aric • 43:42
Right, exactly. Yeah, thankfully, no. No, they are well aware that, you know, people don’t always have internet access. And, you know, being from Ukraine, you know, they’re familiar with that concept, particularly now. So yeah, they do try to be reasonable about that. I mean, they wanna make sure that you actually have paid service because what they don’t want is people, you buy said app for one month, then you activate it and then turn off your internet access, stop paying for said app and then use the apps for a year. You know what I’m saying? Obviously that can’t be a thing. So they try to find a sort of happy medium. So you get quite some time before they start pestering you to connect to the internet. And to be fair, when Setapp first started, they were more aggressive about requiring you to check in that your service was active. But they realized very quickly that that’s not smart. So they adjusted the service a long time ago, and now they give you a good long time before they start pastoring you. But yes, if you’re going to be gone for like a month or more, you’re going to need some internet access at some point. Okay, all right. Now, let me talk about some of the apps that I really enjoy that are part of the Setapp service. Okay. So I’m going to start with one of the apps that MacPaw, the people behind the Setapp service, make. It’s called Clean My Mac. Okay, so I’ll switch over here. Okay, Clean My Mac. So Clean My Mac is a multitude of applications inside one package. It is primarily, as the name suggests, they’re all utilities that are basically to help you design to clean your Macintosh, to get rid of cruft that you no longer need. I will say this for any of the services like this, and it’s not just Clean My Mac, but any utility that offers to clean up your Mac, they will very often offer to clean up things that, while technically may not be needed, may have unintended consequences if you’re not entirely sure what it is doing. So it’s worth paying attention. Don’t just click a button that says clean and then immediately remove all the things that it suggests without at least understanding what it is that it’s trying to get rid of. In most cases, it is stuff that you can safely get rid of, but it may not be stuff that not everything you may want to get rid of. Like if your apps have multiple language support, one of the things that CleanMyMac can remove is those extra languages, which is okay if you really only want one language. But by the same token, you know, if you are multilingual or you have family members who are, and then, you know, you’ve gone ahead and cleaned that out, and then all of a sudden the app no longer works in their favorite language, you know, could be problematic.
Jim • 47:26
By the way, Aric, what I’m seeing on the bottom of your screen looks like maybe half of a purple box and the other half off the screen. Is that what you wanted to display?
Aric • 47:36
Well, this is the CleanMyMac website here.
Jim • 47:39
Right.
Aric • 47:39
Right. And this is a picture of–
Jim • 47:41
Okay. So it’s a web page and it was just showing as much of the web page as it could.
Aric • 47:45
Yeah. Right.
Jim • 47:46
Okay.
Aric • 47:46
So yeah, this is CleanMyMac, but I will actually launch that here so you can see it more directly. Give it a second to start up. Let’s see which one of my screens it’s going to go on to. Okay. Okay. I’m going to pull this over here. So since the last time I launched it, which was like a couple days ago, it has been updated. So it automatically tells me, hey, this is the new features that have been added or fixed in CleanMyMac. So if I want to know about that, then I can just close this out here. And this is CleanMyMac. Okay. Okay, so Clean iMac is a very clean piece of looking software, like there’s only a few options here, but each one of these options is actually typically conceals multiple features. So this smart care function right here, this is, what this does is it runs multiple things to try to clean up your Mac. So if you click scan here, it’ll check out your Mac and then make various recommendations for things it thinks that you can safely clean up. Never just go, OK, just get rid of that stuff. This app will always show you, like, OK, here are the different things that I have found that can get removed. You should take a look to see what that stuff is before you click to have it removed. And then we can go to the separate sections here. And this is just basically a cleanup tool that runs multiple different things to clean up. What’s different between Smart Care and Cleanup? Well, Smart Care will run things like search for malware that Cleanup does not. And then this protection area here We’ll take a look at the potential privacy concerns, malware, et cetera, that may be on your Mac. To be honest with you, CleanMyMac used to have a more clearly defined, like here’s all of the different apps, application, different utilities that are part of this service. And you used to be able to select them individually if you wanted. Now it’s sort of put on this umbrella of like protection, et cetera, which is fine if you don’t really, you know what I’m saying, if you don’t want fine grain control. But I always found that I preferred it when you could more easily select the individual items that you are interested in.
Jim • 50:32
Just to clarify, you’re saying that these are the full versions of the apps. So this kind of thing would happen whether you bought the individual app from the company or if you’re using it.
Aric • 50:43
Yeah, this is the app with the full feature set that you would get if you bought it separately. Right. So it looks like this even if you buy it separately. This is not unique to Setapp. None of them have special Setapp only functionality.
Khürt • 51:01
I can confirm that because I already had CleanMyMac, which I downloaded directly from MacPaw, and it’s the same version and everything that Aric’s showing you.
Aric • 51:10
All right. So one of the services that I use most here is this space lens because periodically you want to check your hard drives to see what’s taking up all the space on that particular hard drive. So if I click scan here, it’ll go through and check that particular hard drive of mine, looking to see where all the space is going. And this can also offer to remove stuff that you specifically choose. For this particular tool, it doesn’t automatically select anything. You have to navigate and say, I want that gone. and then it will remove it for you if you want. Now I can see here’s all my stuff. Then my users folder here is using most of my space on this four terabyte hard drive. Let’s see what’s in there. It’s me. It’s always me. But again, I know what’s here, I access it all the time. So these bubbles are relatively sized compared to how much data is inside each one of them. So you can navigate here down into your libraries folder. So like mobile documents here, this is iCloud related stuff. So if I wanted to, I could go in here and see like, Okay, well, basically, iCloud Drive is using a bunch of space here. And I can see, you know, where that stuff is. And then eventually I can click through. So let’s see if we go. Yeah, well, that’s just one item. So right here, this is just a single item that’s 4.5 gigs. So it is a movie file. And I don’t want to get rid of it. But if I wanted to, I could just click the checkbox here and then I can click review and remove. It’ll show me all of the stuff that I’m I have selected in any area here to remove and then be like, sure, you want to get rid of that stuff? And then you can say yes and that it will move it to the trash for you if that’s what you want.
Jim • 53:41
Is it smart enough that it would, like, if you had a bunch of podcasts, that it could match up between your podcast list and what was stored to see if there’s any orphans or something like that?
Aric • 53:53
So, no. This particular space lens, it’s just the raw files. It doesn’t know anything about what those files are used for.
Jim • 54:02
Gotcha.
Aric • 54:03
Or whether you’d want to keep them or not. However, Jim, there’s going to be an app for you here shortly that I think you’ll like. Okay. Hang on. But so there is here in Clean My Mac, not only there are a variety of cleaning tools, but here’s one thing. So if you use various cloud services, you can clean those up so they don’t use as much space on your local device if you want to. Right now, I’m only using iCloud, But if you use Dropbox, Box.com, or any one of those similar services.
Jim • 54:46
Google or Microsoft?
Aric • 54:48
Right, yeah. If you use those regularly, if they’re installed and have stuff on your machine, they’ll be listed here as options. And you can click through and clean up stuff that is stored in your cloud service if you want to. And then my activity just shows you stuff that you’ve done recently so you can keep track of anything you may have done. So like I said, just be careful with apps like this because it can be very tempting to just hit the scan button and then just be like, get rid of things. And for the most part, you know, Clean My Mac is pretty good about not removing really critical stuff. But like I said, if you use multiple languages, it will happily get rid of those, thinking that you probably only need one language because most people probably only do need a single language. But that may not be good for you. So just be careful when you’re using stuff like this. For the most part, a lot of times when it is deleting things, what it will do is it will delete them by putting them into the trash. And then you can go in and manually empty the trash yourself if you’re like, yep, I definitely want to get rid of that stuff. In fact, it also has the ability to, in some cases, it will offer to back up, like compress and back up some of the stuff that it’s going to get rid of in case you want to keep it around, in case you make a mistake or something like that. But generally speaking, just pay attention to what the app tells you that it’s going to do. CleanMyMac is pretty good that way, but it can be easy to miss stuff. All right. And so now, Jim, I’m going to switch over to an app I think you might like. So this particular one is also part of the Setapp service, and you can get it outside of the service if that is something that you are interested in. It is available for Mac and iOS. There are native apps for both. It is a podcast player, and its claim to fame is that when it downloads podcasts, it keeps them organized in an easily human-readable, human-findable method. So if you’ve ever tried to use the Apple Podcasts app on your Mac, there is no way to have the Apple Podcasts app show you the files that are stored on your Mac because Apple doesn’t think you need to see that. In fact, it stores all of the podcast files with essentially randomly assigned numbers. So even if you navigate to the place where the files are stored, good luck figuring out what those files are because they’re not basically labeled for human consumption.
Jim • 58:05
I think I tried a few years ago and about the only thing you could do is look for the biggest one. At that time, I could search and try playing it and go, yep, that’s one that I need. And I just went on and treated it like you said.
Aric • 58:21
Yep. Okay. So let me fire this up here. All right. And so Mimir here can, which, by the way, if you’re not familiar with Norse mythology, Mimir was basically a god that was around and was basically noted for his knowledge. He was eventually killed by some other gods. And Odin basically found his head and kept it. And the head would give him secret knowledge that other people didn’t have. So it’s sort of interesting that that’s the name for a podcasting app. But the nice thing here is it can import your data from the Apple Podcasts app and automatically add them here. And from a variety of other podcast apps as well.
Jim • 59:24
Do you know what you mean by their data? Do you mean simply which podcast you’ve subscribed to? Does it mean that it can get that it’ll know what you’ve downloaded and redownloaded or find it on your drive?
Aric • 59:39
Well, basically what it tries to do is it tries to pull over all of your podcasts and also any of the items in that podcast that are downloadable. It will bring that over as well. But it doesn’t take the files off your hard drive from the other podcast player and put them in its own. It attempts to re-download the files itself if you have it set to do that. And you have complete control over what it does or does not download. And so I’ll just show you here. You can actually just right-click on a podcast, right? And then you can share it or mark different episodes. But for example, if I want to find this particular episode, if it happens to be downloaded in the Finder, I just go Show in Finder. And by default, this can sync with iCloud if you want it to. It doesn’t have to. It can just download stuff locally. But essentially, it puts it into a podcast folder that contains all of your podcasts that are in the app. And then anything that is downloaded is here with the title clearly noted. And you can just, you know, play it right from the finder. I want it just like you, you know, would normally. So it’s not trying to hide your data. can synchronize with iOS, etc. But I know, Jim, for example, you like to keep certain ones of your podcasts. This particular app will make that a lot easier because it’s designed to store stuff in ways kind of like the way the Apple Music app does. You know, it stores everything sort of sorted neatly, but all the files are clearly labeled and easy to get to. The same is true here. So anything that you download is automatically here. And then you can very finely control exactly what happens, how many episodes get kept. You can say, just keep them all forever. I don’t care. You could say, well, on this particular podcast, only keep the most recent, say, three or four, or don’t download them at all. just stream them when I want to play them. It’s got all the features you would expect from a podcast app, including the ability to sort of get rid of dead air, where, you know, there’s a bit of a gap when people stop speaking in a podcast. It can automatically remove those gaps so that you can listen to the podcast more quickly without having to speed it up. But you can, of course, also speed up the way it speaks.
Jim • 01:02:50
When you use the word, you can automatically, or have it automatically, you can still do things manually, right? Yes. So if it downloaded four recent episodes and you heard the second one, you could get rid of that download.
Aric • 01:03:03
Yes, yep, yep. You just right-click on it here and you can control what happens. You can also manually control your up next list here. So this will show you, Because again, you can say like when in the settings, you can say when I’m done listening to an episode in this podcast, either play the next available pod, you know, episode in this particular podcast or choose a random one out of the list that I’ve provided or choose one completely randomly, etc. So you do have much more fine-grained control than you do with Apple’s own podcast app. And you can also go in here and you can add, you know, if you know the URL for a particular podcast that you want to add. Let’s say, for example, you are a member of PMUG and you want to listen to PMUG’s podcast. Well, you just go here to the plus and go add podcast feed. And then I just paste in the URL and give it a few seconds. And then I would say add to library. And here’s PMUG’s own member cast that has our recent meetings listed in them. So you can listen to this.
Michael • 01:04:33
Excuse me, Aric. We have a question in the chat from Joe V. Can the program stream rather than download?
Aric • 01:04:40
Yes, yes. You have a choice for it not to download anything locally. It will, I mean, it does have to, even when you quote unquote stream something, you’re still downloading data to your Mac. It’s just not kept. So you listen to it and it’s immediately, you know, it disappears. They don’t hang on to the data. Whereas if you have it set to download, it will keep the podcast, whether it’s video or audio, will keep a copy locally. And you can control, you know, keep the most recent five, keep all of them, you know, whatever you want to do. So you can stream them. You can download them. Whatever makes best sense for you. You get to control. Mimir doesn’t make assumptions about how you like to work with podcasts. So it gives you more fine-grained control over what happens. And you can control each podcast separately, or you can say on all podcasts, sort of the default should be the following, unless I manually make a change to a particular podcast. So, yeah.
Jim • 01:05:56
Yeah, you caught something, Joe, where I am coming from the background of I wanted to take my iPhone, my old iPhone that no longer has cellular on it, on a walk around the neighborhood. And so I want to play podcasts when I am not connected on the Internet or I want to be able to play them on the road if I’m taking a 10-hour trip. And I’m going to have and I don’t want to use up my cell service to stream the entire 10 hours. So you’ve got a complete you so that might help explain some of the suggestions Aric was giving oriented toward me
Khürt • 01:06:33
So Aric so what Aric what it’s doing is just basically downloading the entire you make that get request out to where the feed is it’s basically downloading whatever the RSS is and Entire file the entire package depending on the settings you have to your point it’s still downloading a little bit, but you get a choice of streaming that file or keeping that file locally.
Aric • 01:06:57
Right. And you can control that on a, you know, sort of general default for all podcasts. And you can make individual changes for specific podcasts. If, say, for example, there’s one podcast that you like to keep up. Like, for example, if there are a lot of podcasts out there that are sort of like dramas, you know what I’m saying, where there’s a story told and maybe you want to be able to listen to the entire thing start to finish. So, you know, you can download all of the settings and say, play this particular podcast, you know, from episode one all the way to the end. And it’s stored locally, so it’s not using any data. If the feed stops working, those items that you download are still yours to play whenever you want. So if it’s stuff that you want to make sure you keep, then downloading it may make sense.
Khürt • 01:08:04
Basically, when I was traveling back and forth to New York City, the whole remembering to download the podcast thing got annoying. And so what I did was just, I just got a bigger data plan, unlimited. I didn’t think about it twice. I just streamed everything.
Aric • 01:08:21
Yeah, yeah, understandable. And yeah, so, but like, for example, if you’re going overseas for a while, you may not want to spring for a, you know, a data plan while you’re in, I don’t know, Ireland or whatever.
Khürt • 01:08:39
That’s exactly what I did. Yeah. I’m a junkie. ATT,
Jim • 01:09:12
that our podcast stream has some of our recent meetings loaded up there? Yeah. For some reason, somebody said, oh, I remember Dave came and gave a talk 10 years ago, and we removed it from our source RSS feed. Does that mean it would remove that download from your Mac?
Aric • 01:09:36
Well, if the feed had that at some point, and you had downloaded it when it was available, then it would stay in Mimir.
Jim • 01:09:48
Okay.
Aric • 01:09:49
In an app like Apple Podcasts, no, it automatically cleans up stuff in the background.
Jim • 01:09:57
Right. What I got mad at was that a couple of podcasts have turned their old episodes into available by subscription only. So I had downloaded it when it was free to download. Yeah. It got removed from my drive when it became so old that it was, you have to pay the subscription fee.
Aric • 01:10:21
Yeah, I had that happen once myself. Yeah.
Jim • 01:10:23
Yep. And so I’ve got a bunch of episodes that I just said, okay, I guess I don’t want to listen to that service anymore. They abandoned me.
Aric • 01:10:34
Right. Well, I mean, you know, I suppose one could decide, like, for example, the one that happened to me was a particular podcast that I listen to regularly. And I had just finished actually because I just found the podcast before they went paid. And so for a while, you know, in the free stream, there was all of their stuff. So what I ended up doing was I subscribed for a month, got access to the members only feed, downloaded all the stuff and just sort of kept it, you know, for my personal use. And I mean, you could do that in theory with a with paid service if if that was important to you. But there there have been a number of podcasts that have just disappeared. Like there are a lot of podcasts that used to be a thing, you know, even 10 years ago. And you cannot access that data anymore because it doesn’t exist on the Internet. You know, this is why services like the Wayback Machine, etc., are so useful. Because they can often save stuff that is otherwise ephemeral, going to disappear. Okay. So can you export the list from Apple Podcasts and import it to Mimir? Yes and no. Mimir has the ability to look at Apple Podcasts and pull the data from Apple Podcasts, but Apple’s podcast app does not have the ability to export data from itself in any format. So Mimir has sort of figured it out by itself and sort of tries to pull over as much data as it can. But yeah, Apple Podcasts does not make that easy. With Mimir, you can export, like if you set up a list of podcasts, et cetera, you can export it as basically a text file that other podcast players can import as well. So once you’re in Mimir, you can take your data with you if you decide to move somewhere else.
Jim • 01:12:45
But if you’re like tracking, like I’ve been tracking in Apple, which episodes have I listened to? And there’s a few blank ones in there that disappeared before I could get to them. Right. That kind of information you’d have to manually re-enter.
Aric • 01:13:03
Yeah, which ones you’ve listened to or not, it’s not going to bring that over. It’s just basically going to import, oh, here’s a list of the podcasts that you’ve been listening to in Apple Podcast Player. It does the best it can. It’s not perfect because, again, Apple doesn’t – it’s not officially a feature that Apple supports. So Mimir has just sort of tried to figure out a way to get some of that data out of there because obviously a lot of people do use the Apple Podcast Player because it’s the default and it’s what people are used to using. So yes, you can import data, but how much and how successful it’s going to be, it really depends. And you can’t really blame Mimir because they’re doing the best they can with what little access they actually do have. Okay. All right. Let’s move on to Movist Pro. This is an application that can play a wide variety of video files, all sorts of types. I don’t know if any of you remember, but there was a time when the QuickTime player, basically you could add in support to play almost any type of media file that you happen to have on your hard drive. And Apple has long since removed that particular functionality. And so it can only play a limited number of movie files now.
Jim • 01:14:50
I keep on hearing of something called Handbrake and something people use associated with it. Is this kind of comparable in terms of scope of files to those?
Aric • 01:15:01
So what Handbrake is, Handbrake is a tool that converts video files from one format to another. So you could take a file that’s in one format, one movie file that’s in one format, and convert it using Handbrake into an MP4 that QuickTime could play. But no, Movist is a media player.
Jim • 01:15:29
I was just wondering if the scope of files that Movis can play is comparable to what Handbrake can translate.
Aric • 01:15:37
Yeah, yeah. Basically, what it’s got built in is…
Michael • 01:15:43
Maybe it’s comparable to VLC?
Aric • 01:15:46
Yeah, it’s similar to VLC. So VLC is a free open source application that is not super Mac-like because it is designed for Linux, for Windows, and it runs on Mac. So it’s sort of, it’s a master key. It can play almost any type of media file, but it doesn’t look very Mac-like. Movist can do the same thing, except that it looks and works more like a Mac-native movie player. Okay.
Jim • 01:16:21
Here’s one that you were saying that they were the same thing, but this is saying you can use many features that were available in the App Store version. Is that because there’s an App Store version of Movist, and then there’s a Pro that can be downloaded that has more features? Or is this a difference from what you originally saw?
Aric • 01:16:42
Well, so, yeah, what you’re getting is Movist Pro. And you can actually, there’s a free version of Movis that you can access if you happen to have it. But there’s also a non-pro version that has a lesser feature set. And that’s available in the Mac App Store for $5. And if you were to buy it separately for $7, you get the full feature set, which is the same thing that you get in Setapp. You get the full Buvist Pro version with all the functionality. And generally speaking, that’s true of pretty much every app that’s available in Setapp. If the app in question has multiple versions, you typically get the best version that’s available in Setapp.
Jim • 01:17:34
Okay, that was the implication of what you said, but here’s one of these Is the implication really true or did we misread something? So thank you. Right, right, right. Okay, and so
Aric • 01:17:46
Okay, so what I’m gonna do is I’m going to try to open a file here. Okay, so files here these are video files that I have on my Ness and This one right here is what’s called an MKV file MKV also known as Matroska video, is an open source sort of container video format. It can have almost any kind of video inside of it. So it’s sort of like what the.mov files from QuickTime used to be. They could use a variety of different video codecs, etc. So now if we go here and we try to open this, in QuickTime, we’re going to get an error because QuickTime can’t open Matroska video files. But if we select Movist, there it is. And so you can play just about any file, any video format in almost any format in Movist Pro. And it’s very clean, you know, looks kind of like QuickTime in that regard. But you don’t have to worry about converting your files. In the other format, it can just play, including things like if you have old Flash video files, FLV files, it can play those as well. And as a matter of fact, if you want, when you have Movist open, you can go to settings here. And you can control what type of video files get automatically opened by Movist. So you can select them all or you can unselect stuff that you don’t want to have open in Movist by default. But yeah, it’s a really nice playback functionality. It doesn’t convert anything. It just plays what it finds. So it is what it is. All right. So Jim, yeah, if you go to setapp.com slash apps, because of the way the web page is designed, it’s hard to do a search there. So what I would do is, this is why I went ahead and in the PDF file that I provided, it has a list of all of the apps. So if you want to search stuff, use the PDF that I provided because it’ll have the data that you’re looking for. Because it is difficult to find stuff on that app. Even though it’s, you know, visually there, all the apps are there. You know, it kind of looks like this, but on the web. But yeah, the way they’ve designed the particular web page makes it hard in any web browser to actually search for things you’re looking for. So use the PDF that I provided. Okay, let’s see. Now let’s go to Default Folder. So Default Folder is an application that has been around for a very long time, since the classic Mac OS days. It has provided functionality. Its original reason for being was to be able to control what folders get opened when you go to open a file in a particular application or save a file in a particular location. You can control what app comes up by default in there. But on top of that, it has a wide variety of other functionality that makes it something that I just cannot live without.
Jim • 01:21:49
Do you want to name it again? I can’t figure out which one you’re talking about.
Aric • 01:21:52
Default Folder. It’s called Default Folder 10x. And if you were to buy it separately, it’s 40 bucks. It can basically control what folders get opened either universally or per application. So like for example, if you’re working in, let’s say Adobe’s apps and you want, well, most of my files are located here that I work with the Adobe apps. You can control which one gets open by default. In addition, it extends your open and save dialog boxes with a lot of additional functionality, including the ability to instantly navigate to any open window that’s open in the Finder just by clicking on it. It will automatically navigate your open or save dialog box to that folder, which I got to tell you is worth the price of admission just by itself. I will show you here in a moment how that works. But it also adds a ton of additional features. What we’re going to do is we’re going to go to Movist again. Here’s the app without anything open in it. If I want to go open something, I can go open file. By default, it defaults to your last used location. If I have something open in the finder, like for example, this one with the video I just played, as I scroll around on my desktop here, you can see it highlights and shows me a name. If I click right here right now, it will automatically switch from this podcast folder to the one that I have open, which is the one with the video file I just played. So now here’s the video file I just played. Okay, and so the finder doesn’t have the ability to play this video, but if it did, it would actually show you a playable version of the video file down here as a sort of preview. But in addition, I can do things like do a quick search or rename files, duplicate stuff. I can move things around. So, and this is all from the open and save dialog boxes. In addition, you know, you can see the different hard drives on your computer. So if you want to navigate somewhere quickly, you can do that if you can set favorite spots or recently used folders etc but like I said if if no other reason but being able to just click on a on a location and have it quickly switch to that open window is is super useful so highly recommended. Over here you can add commonly used folders or files etc that you want to be able to access in open or save dialog boxes and over here you can just you know select stuff that’s part of your normal Mac that way. In addition you can get information about the file that’s located here. You can see any tags that’s got assigned, comments and also the permissions who’s allowed to access the file etc so like I said super useful if you want to hide that you just click this little disclosure triangle here and it will hide that if that’s not something you want to see all the time seems to me at work with Windows 7 or a
Jim • 01:25:29
company that built their system on Windows 7 they added in this feature and it was always like a why didn’t from our perspective why didn’t finder have that
Aric • 01:25:40
already. Well, the thing is, yeah, Default Folder has been on the Mac since classic Mac OS days. So it’s actually Windows that took the feature from Default Folder, if you want to look at it that way. And Default Folder is in active development. It’s been around for a very long time. St. Clair Software is the name of the company. And it is probably the first thing that I install on any Mac that I regularly use. So here it is, their website. You can still see it has sort of that like old-fashioned Mac OS X sort of button look. So yeah, it’s been around for a very, very long time. And in fact, if you go to the facts here and you scroll down past the troubleshooting section, there is, there it is, the compatibility section. So what version of Default Folder do I need? This doesn’t work with Setapp, but the Default Folder has versions of Default Folder that you can download for everything back to Tiger. They no longer offer the downloads that worked in classic Mac OS. I guess they figure that nobody’s really using that anymore, so they don’t bother. But Tiger, for those of you who don’t remember, is 10.3. So very, very long ago. But yeah, the latest version is in Setapp, or you could buy it separately if that is what you prefer. Okay, let us switch over. to here. Okay. Now, let’s talk about another useful piece of software, ClearVPN. So, ClearVPN is a guaranteed no logs VPN service that has the ability to work with streaming services. So, So for example, if you have Netflix and you want to be able to play the video that is available say in the UK that’s not available in the US, you can connect to one of their streaming friendly VPN sites in the UK and if you access Netflix, then you’ll see only the movies and shows that are available in the UK, which are different than the ones available in the US. But ClearVPN is very clear on the fact that they do not keep any logs of any kind. So here’s their privacy notice, where they have a simplified version for humans to read and the full actual legalese over here. So they are really serious about, you know, you being able to read this and understand what it is you’re getting yourself into. Because there’s a lot of VPN services out there, and a lot of them are super cheap. But most of the time, those really cheap VPN services, they’re selling your data. They’re selling you and what you do to other people. So you want to be careful about this. In fact, Facebook, a number of years ago, got in trouble because they bought a popular free VPN service. And they started to use that to basically watch to see what people were doing. And, you know, trying to figure out where people were going and what services were popular. The reason they bought Instagram many years ago was because of that service. people didn’t realize that they were giving everything that they did to Facebook. And they were like, hey, Facebook says, you know, all these users, they’re all going to Instagram. Maybe we should have, you know, something like Instagram. And so they decided to buy Instagram because of that. But ClearVPN does not do that. You don’t have to worry about that. If you were to buy it separately, it would be basically $45 a year. And this is very useful, particularly if you, for some reason, need to connect to public Wi-Fi. I really recommend that if you can avoid it, don’t ever connect to public Wi-Fi, period. But if you have to, then you really do want to use a VPN like ClearVPN.
Jim • 01:30:26
Do you want to clarify if you use your cell service to connect to the Internet? Is that like connecting to a public Wi-Fi service? Is that like you’re at home and connected via Ethernet to your home server? Or is it something in between?
Aric • 01:30:43
It’s different. So in terms of safety from nearby ne’er-do-wells, you don’t have that problem that you would have on public Wi-Fi. That being said, almost every single one of the major cell carriers in the United States basically were caught having agreements where they would give the government access to the things that you were doing. And your cell provider does keep track of things like where you go and what you’re doing.
Jim • 01:31:27
I assume Comcast does that with my Comcast.
Aric • 01:31:31
Oh, for sure. Yep. It’s in their privacy policy, et cetera, to basically give them the right to do anything they want with your data. And so in that sense, it’s safer than public Wi-Fi, but it has its own set of trade-offs. But at this point, you know, we can’t do without Internet access entirely, most of us.
Jim • 01:31:59
But if you used on your home computer the clear VPN for anything you did on the Internet, that would kind of kick your, or that you did on your cell phone, it would kick those carriers out of it.
Aric • 01:32:12
Right, exactly. Because what happens is when the VPN kicks in, all of the data from, you know, at rest on your phone through to wherever it’s going is in, well, at least through to the end of wherever the VPN is, is entirely encrypted. So your cell phone provider can’t see what you’re doing. Unless your VPN service doesn’t offer encrypted DNS lookups. So if your Mac is still connecting to Verizon’s DNS servers to say, hey, I need to go to Google. Where is Google? Then Verizon in that case would see that, oh, they tried to go to Google. We don’t know what they did when they went there. But clearly they were going there because they did the DNS. But most VPN services route your DNS traffic through them as well. So as long as you trust your VPN provider not to keep track of any of that stuff, then yes, you become somewhat anonymized, at least until wherever the VPN is actually located, in whatever country or state that it’s in. Once the traffic leaves the VPN to connect on the wider internet, whether your data is encrypted depends on whether you’re using HTTPS or a service that is otherwise encrypted. But that is out on the wider internet. So that’s not to say that a VPN doesn’t completely keep you anonymous from absolutely everybody on the internet. But it is certainly a good start. So, yes. And Khürt says, be sure to use an alternate DNS provider from whatever your cable provider uses. Typically, when your cable provider or home internet provider, they give you like a router that you use to connect to the internet. and that router will be automatically configured to use the DNS servers for whoever it is, Comcast or Verizon or, you know, whoever you happen to have for your internet service. But you can usually go in and switch those settings to a different DNS provider. There are a few out there that are either free that, you know, basically make it clear that they don’t keep logs of what searches people do. Or there are paid DNS services that will do that. Basically, you know, you pay them and you use them for your DNS service and they don’t sell your data.
Khürt • 01:35:18
So I’m just going to say that the idea is that you want to be perfectly anonymous on the internet. That violates the very definition of how the internet works. Machines need to talk to each other, and therefore your machine needs to communicate with another machine, identify itself, and so forth and so forth and so forth. There’s always a log somewhere. What Aric is giving you is the best you can do. Change your DNS, use a VPN, but there’s no way to stay unless you want to sit there and do onion rounding all day long.
Aric • 01:35:50
And even there, when you leave the onion endpoint, you can be de-anonymized when you’re leaving. So that has gotten a lot of people in trouble. But that’s a whole other thing. using Tor to try to keep yourself anonymous. It’s good, but it’s not perfect either. So, okay. Let’s just move on quickly here. So the fine people at MacPaw also have a security-only service that is part of Setapp called Moonlock. And they use some of that actually as part of Clean My Mac. But Moonlock is just sort of malware, antivirus, that sort of thing. It protects you in real time from a variety of threats. It has a network inspector, so it can see when you make connections outside of your local network. And I have a separate service that does that, so I don’t use Moonlock to do that. But it can also take a look at the settings on your Mac and make suggestions about things you can do to keep yourself safe. But it has a built-in malware scanner that you can run. Do sort of a deep clean to make sure that there’s nothing on your Mac that might be problematic. Used to be that Macs were pretty safe from a lot of malware, but that is no longer the case. It’s a good idea to keep some sort of scanning service like this around just to make sure, particularly if you’re going to download stuff from the internet, that you’re not getting nefarious stuff. So it’s pretty good. It’s, again, from the same people that make CleanMyMac. So if you’re wondering why it looks the same, that’s why. Okay, let’s move on because we’re starting to run out of time here. Okay, another tool that I use quite a bit that’s in Setapp is PopChar. So you may realize that most fonts have a ton of different characters in them. But it can be hard to access all of these different characters because not all of them have easy shortcuts to access them. You know, they’re different languages, so you need to switch keyboards, or they’re special characters that don’t have an easy-to-remember keyboard shortcut. Well, PopCart can find those things that you use frequently and sort of save them. And the nice thing is that once you find these things, You can either favorite them or it’ll just show you like, hey, here’s ones that you’ve used recently. It’ll tell you, oh, like here’s this character and this is the like the code for it. If it has a keyboard shortcut, it will it will show you what that is as well. Most of these do not. So, you know, but for example, I very often use these, you know, for example, the command key. And the reason why this doesn’t say the command key and it says place of interest sign, because that sign originally started life in campgrounds, I believe in Sweden. And that sign actually was like, hey, this is a point of interest in Sweden nearby the campground. And I think it was Susan Care, the one who originally did the early icons for the Mac, that saw that symbol and was like, that’s the perfect symbol for this key that we were creating for Max. So she sort of appropriated it. And so it became the command key on Max. But that’s why it says place of interest, because it predates all of that. And then here, this one, this symbol wasn’t used for anything other than the option key on the Mac. So it’s actually called option key. And then this is sort of caps lock is often used for the caps lock key or something along those lines. Here’s the degree sign. And then here’s degree Celsius and degrees Fahrenheit. pointy arrows, some X’s. These are stuff that I use a lot. Another one is the Apple logo. It actually doesn’t have a name officially because it’s very obviously the Apple logo. And Apple puts it into the apps. But if you click here, I can insert this into wherever I’m typing. So if I’m typing in, let’s say, a Word document or something, I can just quickly select Popcar. I can select the item that I want to insert and click it. Popcar will go away and insert the character wherever it is my typing. So I have it set so that if I click in the corner here, it automatically comes up. You can control that. It doesn’t have to be always there. It can be other locations. But if you regularly need to paste in a particular character, it can be really, really useful. Okay. Then we’re going to go off to… We did that. We did this. Okay. iBoysoft Data Recovery. This is normally a $100 piece of software. But if you’ve accidentally deleted something off of your Mac, this will help you recover it. Basically, you load it up and you point it at a particular drive or volume on your Mac. And it will search the volume, not only for stuff that is obviously already on the hard drive, but anything that might have gotten deleted that is no longer available. and you can restore the stuff that has been deleted. As always, it’s not perfect. So it’s better to have a good backup than to have to use a piece of software like this. But if you don’t have that option or if your hard drive is going bad,
Jim • 01:42:49
this can help you. I assume that a reason you would not encrypt your hard drive with Apple’s hard drive tool is because this wouldn’t work if you have an encrypted hard drive.
Aric • 01:43:01
Well, it will as long as you know basically the key to unlock your drive. So if the drive is encrypted, it will ask you for, you know, here, you know, type in the unlock for one of the users on that particular drive or volume. And then it will be able to access it directly. Now, if you’re already logged in as a user, it will be able to access any of the volumes that you yourself have access to. It will show you everything that’s available, but if you don’t have access to it, it will ask you to authenticate so that it can access that data. Again, useful to have. It works on APFS and HFS drives. It actually works in not just HFS+, but HFS, the old, the really old one. But you have to switch settings to get it to work. It’s a bit of a pain. But you can restore data from old, very old drives, as long as you have the ability to access them in some way, of course, which can be easier said than done. But this would be $100 if you bought it separately. So certainly worthwhile. Now here’s something I use all the time. Downie is a tool that will allow you to download video, audio, and pictures from websites that don’t want you to be able to download those things easily. It is not designed for use with streaming services that have DRM encrypted video. but things like YouTube or Vimeo and a wide variety of other services as well, including, for example, our own website. So as most of you know, we automatically post videos from our recent presentations on our website. But because our membership software wants to, you know, keep this only for members only, you have to be logged in to access it. And there’s no easy way to download the video from here. It’s not because we don’t want you to be able to download it. It’s just because that’s how this particular software works. But if I use Downie, I can access, I can download this directly. Right up here is a link that automatically opens it in Downie. It automatically recognizes, “Hey, I can’t access the thing that you’re trying to access because you need to log in.” It has a guided user mode. You actually can log in. Now, I’ve already done that here to just save time. I’ve logged in as myself. Now, what it’s showing me is like, “Hey, I found a video file on this page. Do you want this?” You can see information about it. And then if you want to download it, you just hit the plus and it will start downloading the video onto your computer after a few seconds once it gets started. And then you can also do things like, hey, there’s a picture here that you might want. So I can actually download the copy of this picture. In fact, if I have lots of stuff on this page, lots of pictures, I can just click download all and it will download a copy of the pictures directly to my Mac. And then if it detects any subtitles, you can download those separately if you want, or it can download it automatically as part of this. So if I go here and then I go to reveal and finder. Okay, I’ll just switch over here. You can see it downloaded the 1.2 gigabyte file, and I can just play it locally from my hard drive. Nothing wrong with that. We don’t mind if you’re a member. You can do whatever you want with the videos as long as you don’t post it for free on the internet for everybody to access. We prefer you didn’t do that.
Jim • 01:47:23
Or edit it and make Aric a liar.
Aric • 01:47:25
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you want to do that on your personal Mac, you go to town. You do what you want. Just don’t publicly post it because I will have to get upset. Okay, so that’s Downie. In addition, they have another application that works with it called Permute. Permute is like Handbrake that I talked about earlier. It is designed to convert audio and video into other formats. So you can, for example, Downie just downloads whatever the version of the video that is available on this website. So whatever it is, it just downloads a copy. You know, if that’s playable on your Mac or not, you know, it doesn’t control that. But you can tell Downie, hey, if this isn’t an MP4 file, automatically use permute to convert whatever video this is into MP4 format so I can view it normally from now on. So the two can work together to download and convert your video files into whatever format you want. Or, for example, if you don’t want to keep the video, but you just want the audio, you can tell Permute, hey, I know this is a video file, but just keep the audio from the video. Don’t keep the rest. So super useful. And together, Downie and Permute cost about $27 if you bought them separately. TextSoap. This is something that has been around for eons on the Mac. It is designed to take text and clean it up in a wide variety of ways. So, for example, let me just bring it up real quick. I pasted in a copy here of the HTML from the PMUG’s own website. But if I want to, I can go to HTML here, and then I can go extract text from HTML source. And if I do that, I click it, all the HTML code disappears. Now, the only thing that’s left behind is the actual human readable text. So if you want to clean up something so that you can just read, you know, what’s on the page without having to look at all the code, you can very quickly do that. It’s super useful to do things like, you know how sometimes you get stuff forwarded from another source in your email and it has all those, like, forwarding characters? You can clean all that out automatically just by, you know, a couple of clicks. And it’s super useful. It can work inside any app. So there’s actual menu bar item where you can just, you know, when you copy the text, you say, like, whatever’s in my keyboard right now, whatever’s in my clipboard right now, just go ahead and, you know, clean it up. Do this. Remove extra spaces or whatever. And it will clean up your keyboard, what’s in your keyboard, I mean your clipboard, wow, your clipboard automatically. So very useful, been around for a very long time. This is $50 if you buy it separately. TextSniper. TextSniper is a tool that started before Apple started doing this sort of thing. It has the ability to take screenshots of your screen, but what it does is not just take a screenshot, but it will look at the text and try to basically copy out the text that appears in the screenshot. And one of the things that’s super useful with this particular tool, because even the Mac now has the ability to automatically find text in pictures. was relatively recently added. But one of the nice things is if you go to, let’s just go over here, and we’re going to go to TextSniper. There we go. If we see a QR code on the screen, now normally you’d have to get out your something with a camera, smartphone or whatever, take a picture of the QR code to see what’s in the QR code. Well, TextSniper can actually take a screenshot of the QR code and figure out what the QR code actually is. So if I enable it and just click here, on my other screen it says copy to clipboard. What it’s done is copy not the picture, but the location, the URL that will take me to here. That QR code links to here. So it just pastes the URL into your clipboard. So super useful for that.
Khürt • 01:52:48
Couldn’t you just have clicked a link off the original website in the first place?
Aric • 01:52:52
I mean, here’s the thing. If you happen to have that, but most of the time when you see QR codes, that’s all you see.
Khürt • 01:53:00
They don’t show you the URL. I use it for my phone. I pull out the phone because it’s usually something for the phone. It’s not something that’s meant to be scanned on a desktop. It’s a phone thing.
Aric • 01:53:10
Yeah, but the other thing, everybody assumes that you’ve always got your phone with you, and you’ll just bring out your phone to scan the code and bring it up.
Khürt • 01:53:21
Raise your hand if you go to the bathroom with your phone. Because I know no one I know goes anywhere without their phone.
Aric • 01:53:30
I leave it there.
Khürt • 01:53:31
The phone is like the purse, right? Women don’t go anywhere without picking up their purse off the table.
Aric • 01:53:36
Well, the nice thing about it is you don’t have to use it if that’s not a feature you find useful.
Khürt • 01:53:40
No, I’m just trying to understand what TextSniper is saying with this app that scans QR codes off of a map.
Aric • 01:53:49
It’s not just QR codes. As I said, it recognizes any text in any picture anywhere. So it really is about extracting the text from that. the QR code thing is just an added bonus. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay.
Jim • 01:54:07
Khürt, are you saying that when you take a picture of a QR code, it’ll tell you what it’s going to do without doing it?
Aric • 01:54:15
It will copy the URL wherever that QR code links to. It won’t take a picture of the QR code. It’ll just paste the URL wherever that QR code links to. it’ll paste it into your uh into your clipboard so that you can go there okay i thought also that
Jim • 01:54:35
qr codes could do a lot more than just take you to a page they can but most of the time when
Aric • 01:54:41
when you see them online they’re really just glorified uh urls okay they don’t have to be
Jim • 01:54:47
but they almost maybe i was thinking they’re like uh google search ones that tell you all the details about the person’s computer who did the search as well. So never mind. Keep going.
Aric • 01:54:58
I’m sorry. Right. That’s fine. Okay. In addition, when TextTyper takes a picture, it can automatically read it out loud to you. So whatever the text is in the thing that you have just copied, it can read that out loud, which is good if you’re low vision or otherwise have problems. I can serve as a reader for whatever it is that you’ve just selected. So it’s not terribly expensive. It’s only $8 if you purchase it separately. And the last thing I’m going to talk about is Gemini here. Gemini is another MacPaw item, just because if you’ve never used one of these, it’s useful, which is it’s a duplicate file finder. So it can look at pictures and find duplicates. It can look at audio and find duplicates, video, find duplicates, etc. And if you’ve never used this on your Mac, you probably should, because you’ll be shocked at how much duplicated items end up sitting around somewhere in your
Jim • 01:56:10
hard drive taking up space. Identical duplicates or near duplicates? So it can do both. It can do
Aric • 01:56:18
identical duplicates that matches as close as it’s able to figure out. Or it can do like, this is pretty close to exactly the same. Maybe the file name is different, or maybe the picture is a very slightly different angle. And so it can show you that. And then you make the decision about what you do or don’t want to keep. It doesn’t automatically do stuff. I’ll be honest with you. If you’ve never used the duplicate file finder before and you have said app, definitely worth checking out. It’s not my, this Gemini 2 is not my favorite duplicate file finder, to be honest. I’ve used another one for years that I think is even better because it has a much better ability to automatically select stuff that it thinks you probably want to get rid of if it finds duplicates. And it sort of can auto-select the ones that it thinks you’re probably going to want to get rid of. It still shows you all of them, but it pre-selects that stuff. Gemini 2 has that capability, but essentially you have to set it up yourself. They don’t really have much in the way of automatic features. This one, PhotoSweeper, which is not in a Setapp, but is available on the Mac App Store for, I think, $15. This is the one I use most of the time. It says PhotoSweeper, but this also works for videos and other types of files. It is really designed for people who work a lot with videos, with, I’m sorry, with pictures. It can work with Lightroom Classic, Apple Photos, to natively find duplicates. It also works with the Capture One service. So if you’re a professional photographer, this is the one you’re probably going to want to use. It’s automatic selection of duplicates is much better. than Gemini. But hey, Gemini is part of the Setapp service, so you don’t have to pay for it. So give it a try. And it can find a lot of data on your hard drive that is duplicated maybe you don’t need anymore. So yeah. But sure, lots of people do like Gemini. All right. OK. So the grand total of all of these apps, if you were to buy them in the first year, would be $367.26. That’s if you bought them separately, directly from the developers. So Setapp is only $107.99 for a single Mac for a year. So if you like these apps, again, there’s a pretty good value there. Now I realize that, let me, we can go ahead and stop the share. Okay, I realize of course, that so much of our lives is switched to subscriptions. Not just the software we use, but also podcasts that we love, music, videos, and heck, even new cars have subscription features now, which drives me nuts. So it can be really hard to justify adding yet another service to the pile, but if said app has apps that you are interested in, you’ll almost certainly get more value out of the service than it costs you for a year. So if you’re unsure, give it a try. You can try it free for a month at the go.setapp.com/invite/Aric3. And then you’ll be able to try it for a full month without having to pay anything. So all right. Let me post links into the chat one more time for anyone who needs them. There’s that. and I will post the PDF link one more time. That control, that has a list of all of the apps in Setapp. So if you’re looking, if you wanna look through the list, check out this right here, the iCloud link that I just gave. Okay, are there any other questions?
Jim • 02:00:38
– Related to this, did you happen any year to notice how much money you would save by not having to pay for the updates that you get as part of the monthly fee through?
Aric • 02:00:52
– So I actually did for the first, for the first like two years, I kept track of like all of the releases that came out that I would have had to pay for. And I kept track of the, you know, obviously the initial payment, which is higher. And for those items that weren’t already subscriptions themselves, like Jedi 2 is a subscription product. So even if you buy it separately, you’re still on the hook for a subscription.
Jim • 02:01:21
Right.
Aric • 02:01:23
But I saved quite a bit of money by using Setapp. And like I said, the nice thing about Setapp is sometimes I’m like, I need to be able to do something, but I don’t have software that makes that easy. So I often go to Setapp to go like, hmm, I wonder if there’s something in here I could use. And almost always there is like, oh, hey, they have this app that does this particular thing that I need. So I found a lot of software that way. So even if you don’t use it for an extended period of time, it can be good just to get an extended test drive of a variety of different apps to see if these are things that you might like to use on your own.
Jim • 02:02:10
I didn’t see anything that would replace like Carbon Copy Cloner or another backup of the Mac tool.
Aric • 02:02:16
Yeah, there’s no backup.
Jim • 02:02:18
Is that too big a thing to be in something like Setapp?
Aric • 02:02:21
No, I don’t think so. It’s just that they don’t currently have any developers who make that kind of product who are in Setapp. They may add them in the future, who knows? But right now, yeah, there’s nothing like that in Setapp. Okay. Okay. Let’s see if there’s any questions that I missed here in the chat. Does Pop Character access symbols that you cannot access with the Apple feature, the emoji, and symbol picker? So, yes, because there are a lot of characters in every single font that you have on your Mac. And PopChar has access to all of them and can create like a master list of every single glyph that is in every font that’s currently on your Mac and make a master list of them. So, yes, you can find stuff that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. Not easily, anyway. Obviously, you know, if it’s in a font, it’s typically accessible in some method. But honestly, good luck. I mean, how do you even know some of that stuff’s there? A lot of stuff is like, you know, mathematical, you know, or scientific related, you know, symbols or glyphs that you may not run across under normal circumstances. Or you may not realize that you have a font on your Mac that has a particular symbol in it. And you don’t have to worry about where it’s located. PopChar will be able to paste in that glyph regardless of what font that you happen to have on your system. So super useful. They update it frequently. It has full emoji support as well. And you can search for stuff based on the name of the glyph that you’re looking for. But like I was showing you before, you might look for command thinking that the command… And if you didn’t know about its history as a symbol, I think, like I said, in Swedish campgrounds, then you wouldn’t know that place of interest is what you’re supposed to look for. And so PopChart tries to make it, you know, it has alternate names for different glyphs, but it’s not perfect. But you can do a search for a variety of different things, and it will try to find the thing that you’re looking for. And then you can add it to your favorites so that you don’t have to search in the future. So it’s really nice when you have to paste something in quickly. Okay. All right. Well, I think that’s it for tonight. We ran a little bit over. Sorry about that, folks. We will be posting this video online and into the podcast over the next couple of days. So, you know, I recommend checking out Setup and see what you think.
Jim • 02:05:36
Did you want to comment on my 826 post?
Aric • 02:05:40
Okay, hold on a second.
Jim • 02:05:42
In other words, when you’re saying that you might beware if you remove language support, and I was just wondering if Apple’s got things nice these days has done things nicely so you can say oh uh we used to have uh Swiss German but I took it out by mistake and I wanted back in
Aric • 02:06:01
just add it can you just do that well here’s the thing because where it’s removing the languages isn’t just from uh mac os it’s removing it from the actual applications oh hard drive so that depends on the individual application that you remove the language from. It is possible that just simply re-downloading the application will bring back all of the language files that it ships with by default, or maybe the application has a setting where you can pick the language that you want to download. for the most part, most apps that support various languages ship with all of the language resources
Jim • 02:06:47
embedded in the application already. Oh, okay. I didn’t realize that. I assumed it was just going to the Apple libraries and allowing it in that clean my Mac would be taking it out of the
Aric • 02:07:00
Apple library. Now, it can actually remove it from the applications themselves too, which makes the app’s smaller, but of course, removes functionality. And if the languages are important, critical to what it does, if you remove the language files it relies on, the app might get a little weird because it’s like, I expect this file to be here and it’s not here. But for the most part, if you remove unused languages, as long as you don’t need those languages and you don’t select them in the app, then it’ll just work, you know, and it’ll just be smaller. But you’ve got to be aware that like, you know, anytime you go messing about with what’s inside an application, there’s
Jim • 02:07:46
a potential for issues. Yeah. I seem to remember something like an app that was written in China or with Han Chinese or something, or Mandarin. And it was like, they didn’t make it clean that you could remove Han Chinese if you were in AmArica.
Aric • 02:08:03
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, again, the developers make certain assumptions about their applications.
Jim • 02:08:10
They wanted it so that they could support.
Aric • 02:08:12
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. But generally speaking, apps, you know, because they have to work within Apple’s APIs, et cetera, generally speaking, they follow Apple’s guidelines for implementing other languages. And when they do that, apps like Clean My Mac can go in there and remove those items. So yeah, it can save yourself a lot of space if you’re low on space, but it can also create problems without meaning to. Clean My Mac’s not trying to damage your drive. And it does a reasonable job of making sure that you don’t remove stuff that are absolutely critical. But for example, like the disc lens feature, that can show you stuff in places that you normally don’t have access to. And remove stuff that you probably shouldn’t remove. It can’t damage the core OS because nothing has the ability to write or remove those files other than Apple. So it can’t do that, but it can remove stuff that the OS itself is expecting to be there, you know, that isn’t suddenly. So if you’re not careful, you can cause problems. All right. Well, I think we’re going to call it a night. Thanks for coming, everybody. That concludes tonight’s podcast. See you next month.