From 9to5Mac:

With macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to screen recording permissions will become a little bit more tedious. Apple is rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit permission on a weekly basis to these types of apps, and every time you reboot your Mac.

While I understand Apple’s desire to make it clear that you’ve given apps permission to record your screen, this seems like a nuisance. You have to click “Allow For One Week” each week for every app that’s actively capturing or streaming screen images. As 9to5Mac says, that’s going to get pretty tedious.

And if an app isn’t using Sequoia’s new “screen recording picker”, you’ll see this very technically worded warning. I’m not sure how non-technical users will respond to this:

Of course, the reason I’m grousing about this is because Default Folder X is affected. In some situations, DFX captures an image of an Open or Save dialog and displays it on top of the real file dialog as a “curtain” to hide what it’s doing while it manipulates the dialog. It doesn’t store or transmit the images – it just takes a screenshot of the file dialog, pops it up on the screen to obscure the dialog while it twiddles a menu, then throws away the screenshot.

Now Sequoia is throwing up scary weekly reminders about it recording “personal or sensitive information”. Sigh. Assuming that this new Sequoia “feature” is here to stay, I feel the only workable solution is to remove the screen captured façade and just put up a blank window to hide what Default Folder X is doing. This is … ugly. Here’s a quick illustration:

Here’s what Default Folder X is doing. Notice the menu popping up after opening “Empty Folder”:

 

Here’s what it currently looks like with a captured image overlayed to hide the menu activity. As intended, you don’t see anything at all:

 

Here’s what it looks like without screen recording, using a blank window to hide activity instead. There’s an unpleasant white flash:

I realize it’s not the end of the world – having that blank window flicker on the screen doesn’t change the functionality of Default Folder X. It’s just sloppy looking and aesthetically grating.

How you can take action

If you’d like to help out – and save yourself weekly warnings about the apps you use that capture screen images – please use Feedback Assistant to submit a bug about this to Apple. At the very least, they could add a “Don’t remind me again” checkbox to that warning alert and save us all from being pestered every week.

The bottom line

If Sequoia’s repeated reminders and dire warnings about privacy intrusion are here to stay, I don’t see any way forward except to eliminate the use of captured screen images. This reduces the quality and functionality of my software, but if the warnings are enough to put off some users, removing the dependent features is the only way to stop them from scaring people.

And just for the record, the use of captured screen images isn’t something new. Default Folder X and other applications have used this kind of trick for years to hide unpleasant side effects, clean up graphical glitches, or get information they can only get by looking at the screen. We’ve just come to a point where Apple feels it’s necessary to tell you about it on the off chance that some app is spying on you – which Default Folder X isn’t doing, but I do understand the potential danger.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 7th, 2024 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Default Folder X, Development, Random Ramblings, Sequoia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.