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Isleta

Privacy

It reads your day. It does not keep it.

That sentence is the whole policy. Everything below is the detail behind it. The one thing that leaves the machine is a place name, and only when you have asked for the weather.

What never leaves your Mac

  • What is playing, and who it is by
  • What is on your calendar today, and tomorrow
  • Where you are, and what the weather is doing there
  • Which files you put on the shelf, what Isleta converted them to, and every word it transcribed out of them
  • Your volume, your settings, your keyboard layout

All of it is read on your Mac, drawn on your Mac, and forgotten. Transcription runs on the machine, through the same on-device speech models the system uses, and asks for no permission of any kind.

What it does write down

  • Your settings — a small preferences file in your own user library
  • A log at ~/Library/Logs/Isleta. Events only, never user content: not a track title, a file name, an event title or a city. It goes nowhere on its own
  • The shelf and the drop history, in ~/Library/Application Support/Isleta. Where the files are, not what is in them — a bookmark and a path per item, never a copy

What Isleta sends, in full

Two requests, and both are yours to switch off.

  • The update feed, asking whether a version newer than yours exists. It carries nothing about you, and automatic checks are a switch in Settings
  • Apple’s weather service, asking what the weather is at a place — your location, or the city you typed. It carries that place and nothing else, and asks nothing until you have given it one

An install that does neither never touches the network at all. Not on launch, not on wake, not ever.

  • No account
  • No telemetry
  • No analytics
  • No crash reporting service

What it asks the system for

As little as it can get away with, and never cold.

  • The first run walks through five of them one page at a time: what allowing it buys, the apps or devices on your Mac it buys it for, and which button to press
  • Skip is on every page the moment Continue stops being what advances, so none of them is a wall
  • The drawing of the dialog is deliberately not a faithful copy — no real text, no system artwork, because a convincing replica of a security prompt is a phishing lesson
  • Each is explained again in Settings, next to the switch it belongs to

None

The pages and the swipe between them, the shelf and everything it converts and transcribes, the lock screen card, the wake greeting, hover, haptics, the shortcuts

Nothing to decline. Most of the app is here.

Accessibility

Reading which media key you pressed — so the island can say “Volume” rather than a symbol you guess at, lean at the end of a range, and answer the key itself so macOS never draws its own HUD

The level still appears; it just cannot tell which key made it, and Apple’s HUD goes on appearing. This is the one prompt macOS shows again after a refusal, so changing your mind costs nothing.

Automation

The one-shot “what is playing right now?” read at launch, for Music and Spotify

You lose the first track of a session, nothing else. Live updates need no permission.

Bluetooth

Hearing AirPods and other audio devices connect, and the charge they arrived on

No device ever appears in the island. Nothing else changes.

Calendars

The events on the home page, and the whole day behind the date

The page says so, and says which: a clear afternoon and a refused calendar look identical, and showing the first when it means the second is pretending to work. Full access rather than write-only, because write-only returns no calendars to read.

Location

The weather where you are

Type a city instead and the weather works exactly as well. This is the one permission with a complete alternative.

Focus

Knowing a Focus is on, so the island can stay quiet. Read when an activity is about to be published, never on a timer

Isleta shows activities as usual. It never changes your Focus and never records it.

How it reaches you

Direct download, signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple.

  • Not on the Mac App Store: reading which media key you pressed requires Accessibility, which the sandbox does not permit
  • Updates come through Sparkle
  • Every archive carries a signature the installed app verifies against a key it already holds — so someone who could rewrite the update feed still could not ship you an update

Questions about any of this belong in Discussions, where the answer is useful to more than one person.