I’m delighted to announce that in the last week, a couple of products which build on my free utilities have been released.

The first is St. Clair Software’s Go64, which is a free utility to check your Mac for 32-bit software prior to upgrading to Catalina. It works much more quickly than my 32-bitCheck, as it uses Spotlight metadata to discover which apps and other code are still 32-bit. That is a method which I have looked at, and in my experience it isn’t as thorough or comprehensive as the method used by 32-bitCheck, which is why that doesn’t use it, and why 32-bitCheck is so slow in comparison.

Go64 also provides detailed advice about what to do with individual apps, and is free.

The other product has been inspired by my free utility Dystextia, which obfuscates text using unusual Unicode code points. Jan Kaiser’s free keyboard layouts for macOS and Windows allow you to type obfuscated characters straight into documents, rather than converting existing text.

I’m particularly grateful to both Jon Gotow and Jan Kaiser for acknowledging my efforts, and encourage you to use their products as well. St. Clair software has been delivering fine software for macOS for a very long time: its flagship product Default Folder X is one of the great Mac utilities of all time.