In case you didn’t spot the message from WWDC back in June: Catalina extends the privacy protections in Mojave to encompass a whole load of new aspects, such as accessing files in your ~/Documents folder beyond conventional Open/Save File dialogs.

I’ve been considering how best to incorporate these changes in my free utility Taccy, which is intended to help users and developers through problems with such privacy settings. My first thought was simply to add more checkboxes to deal with the new controls, but when I lost count of them, I realised this wasn’t a good way to go.

Instead, Taccy 1.2 keeps the same basic layout and the privacy settings common to both Mojave and Catalina, but provides an exhaustive list of the Usage Description strings provided by an app, in its text report.

So, for example, my app xattred includes five Usage Description strings covering the relevant items for Mojave. These are translated into three entitlements, and these are all listed in its report. Given the sheer number of these now, I can’t see a better way to provide full information about these important entries in the app’s Info.plist file.

Taccy 1.2 has also been tested more on Catalina, where it’s looking good. I hope that it proves useful.

Taccy 1.2 is available now from here: taccy12
from Downloads above, from its Product Page, and via its automatic update checking.