BTW, for anyone who wants a clean start for testing, hold down Control-Option-Command and choose About SetShot from the SetShot menu. A dialog will confirm that you want to reset to factory defaults, which means deleting all your snapshots, journal, settings, and so on. It’s extreme, but useful for testing.
Technically not first launch, but I did get such a request after re-launching after using the clean start key combination. This is on v1.0b19.
Drat! I must not have tested that as thoroughly as I thought, and tracking down the particular calls that trigger that dialog is proving really hard.
No worries. I actually appreciated the prompt. If I can reproduce it I’ll let you know.
Making sure that Media & Apple Music permissions dialog does not appear unless you click its button in Settings turned out to be quite difficult. Claude had to put in debugging steps as it scanned the various files to find out what was the last file accessed before the dialog came up. Fingers crossed that it’s fixed now.
1.0b21 is now available with a bunch of other changes as well. SetShot > Check for Updates should work, or you can download here. Keep those suggestions and submissions coming!
https://github.com/adamengst/setshot-app/releases/latest
1.0b21
- Smarter display of Finder new window setting — Instead of showing cryptic codes like PfCm or PfLo, SetShot now shows your actual Mac name, home folder name, startup volume name, or the name of a custom folder you’ve chosen.
- Current macOS alert sound names — macOS 15 renamed most of the built-in alert sounds (Submarine → Submerge, Morse → Pong, Funk → Funky, etc.). SetShot now shows the current names rather than the legacy ones.
- Journal search improvements — Searching the journal now looks at setting values and your notes in addition to setting names and locations. The list also scrolls back to the top when you type a new search.
- Fixed: Submit Feedback required at least one issue to be checked — Typing in the notes field alone was enough to enable the Submit button, but clicking it would fail. Now the button stays disabled until you check at least one checkbox.
- Fixed: Comparison from a notification could show incomplete results — In some cases, clicking a SetShot notification to view a comparison would open the results before the knowledge base had finished loading, causing recognized changes to appear as unrecognized. This no longer happens.
- Baseline improvement — The built-in baseline snapshots were captured on a virtual machine and contained VM-specific computer names, which would appear as spurious “before” values in comparisons. These have been replaced with “not set.”
- Knowledge base updates — Improved UI location labels throughout, correct Battery / Energy and Lock Screen paths for desktop Macs, and many new noise filters.
1 Like
Indeed, because, as Howard Oakley keeps trying to remind people, rather than reading/writing from/to .plist files, in most cases folks should be interacting with the underlying macOS database (cfprefsd) through defaults.
1 Like
And even when working through the defaults command, I never want to create a situation where a bug could cause confusion or worse by writing something that’s either unexpected or wrong.
1 Like
Thanks to @blm for an interface suggestion that simplifies the snapshot selection for comparison. That and more is in 1.0b22, available from Check for Updates.
1.0b22
-
Redesigned snapshot list — The snapshot library now uses a single list for all snapshots. Each row shows a brief summary of the recognized changes found since the previous snapshot, along with a count. Rows with no recognized changes say so explicitly — either “No recognized changes” or “X unrecognized change(s)” — so you can get a sense of what a comparison found.
-
New selection mechanics — Click any snapshot to select it (shown with a checkmark). Click a second snapshot to form a Before/After pair — whichever is higher in the list is After, whichever is lower is Before. If you already have two selected and click a third, both are deselected and the new one gets the checkmark so you can build a fresh pair. Command-click to force-select a snapshot as Before, and Shift-click to force-select a snapshot as After.
-
Baseline snapshot improvements — Built-in baseline snapshots are now labeled “macOS Sequoia 15.7.7 baseline defaults” (and similarly for Tahoe) for clarity, and appear in the same style as your own snapshots.
-
Auto-delete empty scheduled snapshots now defaults to on — The setting to automatically remove scheduled snapshots with no changes was supposed to default to on, but was defaulting to off due to a missing preference value. Fixed.
-
Selectable text in Submit and Feedback sheets — The setting summary in the Submit and Submit Feedback sheets can now be selected and copied.
-
Knowledge base updates — Added energy settings (sleep timers, display sleep, Power Nap, standby delay, and more); added Allow Handoff; improved noise filtering for chronod and power management entries that were previously blanket-suppressed.
This explanation is a welcome relief: After reading the instructions, I was worried when the app did not request any system permissions on launch (using v1.0b24). If you have a moment — I know, I know… 
— maybe you’ could edit the Permissions section on SetShot’s README page. That page still states, “On your first snapshot, macOS will ask for Media & Apple Music access.”
P.S.: Thanks for building this little gem, Adam. I’ve just used it for the first time when upgrading to 26.6, and it performed exactly as expected.
Oops, forgot to updated that. Fixed.
I’m pretty close to releasing this—just have to figure out all the TidBITS writing that will surround it.
1 Like
FWIW, I ran a before and after comparison updating 26.6 to 27b2. Known changes were four, all about the build number and version number changing, all expected. There were 113 unknown changes, which all looked like noise to me. I can submit them if there’s any interest on @ace ‘s part.
Thanks, but let’s hold off on macOS 27 changes for now, since I haven’t had a chance to see what SetShot sees there.