FAQ

Solace is a menu bar app that keeps your Mac in step with the world outside. It switches light and dark mode automatically, warms your screen in the evening, swaps your wallpaper to match, and can even turn dark when the weather does. It replaces f.lux, a wallpaper switcher, and constant manual toggling with one small app.

Any Mac running macOS 13 Ventura or later. Solace runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel, and the whole app weighs in at around 3 MB, so it is light on disk and on memory. It lives quietly in your menu bar and stays out of your way.

Open the downloaded file and drag Solace into the Applications folder shown next to it, then launch it from Applications. It appears in your menu bar as a small sun or moon icon. On first launch a short three-step welcome walks you through the two permissions Solace uses, then asks for the licence key from your purchase confirmation email. Enter it, click Activate License, and you are all set.

Solace is a menu bar app, so it deliberately stays out of your Dock and app switcher. Look at the top-right of your screen: a sun icon means light mode, a moon means dark mode. Click it to open the control panel, where everything lives: the mode switch, wallpapers, schedule, warmth, and weather. To quit, open the panel and use the Cmd Q control in the footer.

Two main ones. Location Services lets Solace work out your local sunrise and sunset, right on your Mac, so solar scheduling knows when to switch. Automation (controlling System Events) is how macOS lets any app flip dark mode, so you will see a system dialog the first time Solace switches: click OK. If you enable weather mode, Solace also asks to show notifications so it can tell you when a gloomy day activates dark mode. Location is optional and can be granted later from the Schedule section.

No. On a fresh install Solace respects whatever mode your Mac is already in. When the first natural transition arrives, a gentle prompt appears in the panel: "Switch to Dark Mode?" (or Light), with Switch and Keep Current buttons. Answer once and Solace switches automatically from then on. If automatic switching seems quiet on day one, open the panel; the prompt is probably waiting for you.

Open the Solace panel from the menu bar, click the small info button at the bottom-right, and turn on the Launch at Login switch. Solace registers itself with macOS the proper way, so you will also see it under System Settings, General, Login Items, and changing it in either place keeps both in sync. With it on, your Mac follows the day from the moment you log in.

Solace keeps itself current: it quietly checks for updates shortly after launch and every hour after that, and updates are free forever. To check on demand, open the panel, click the info button at the bottom-right, and choose Check for Updates. Your version number sits just under the Solace name in that same About panel. Every update is signed and verified before it installs, so what arrives is exactly what we shipped.

Solace follows the sun. It works out your local sunrise and sunset right on your Mac, recalculates them daily as the seasons change, and switches modes at each transition. Separate offsets let you shift sunrise and sunset independently by up to two hours, so dark mode can arrive a touch early or wait a while. Turn on weather mode and grey, overcast days go dark too. And you are always in charge: the mode card and the global keyboard shortcut toggle instantly from any app.

Of course. Click the big Light Mode / Dark Mode card at the top of the panel, or use the keyboard shortcut (Cmd Shift D by default), any time you like. Solace respects your choice and simply resumes at the next natural transition, sunrise or sunset. With weather mode on, a manual switch is remembered for the whole day, even through sleep or a restart, so a gloomy-day decision never overrides you.

Yes, and sunrise and sunset are adjusted independently. In the Schedule section, drag the sun or moon marker along the timeline to shift that transition by up to two hours either way, or click the time shown beneath it for quick presets: exact time, or 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour before or after. Handy if you like dark mode to arrive a touch before dusk, or light mode to wait until you have had coffee.

Each morning, shortly after sunrise, Solace looks at the forecast average cloud cover across the daylight hours ahead. If it meets your sensitivity threshold, the whole day runs in dark mode; otherwise it stays light. One decision per day means no flickering between modes as clouds pass. When a gloomy day activates dark mode you get a notification with the cloud percentage and a Keep Light button if you would rather stay bright. Nights are always dark, whatever the weather.

Yes. The Weather section has three sensitivity levels: Cloudy triggers dark mode from 50% cloud cover, Overcast (the default) from 70%, and Gloomy only from 90%, so Gloomy means dark mode is saved for properly grey days. Hover over each button to see its threshold. Changing sensitivity re-evaluates today's decision straight away using the latest cloud data, so you see the effect immediately.

Yes, nothing is a black box. Open the panel, click the info button at the bottom-right, then Weather Decisions. You will see the last ten daily decisions: the cloud percentage, the threshold it was compared against, your sensitivity at the time, the outcome, and what triggered it. The Weather section itself also shows the day's averages for cloud, rain, and UV, and you can click the temperature to flip between Celsius and Fahrenheit.

Yes. Pick a light wallpaper and a dark one, and Solace swaps them the moment your Mac changes mode. Your light wallpaper greets you each morning, and your desktop follows the sky at sunset with no prompt and no interruption. It works across all your displays at once, so multi-monitor setups stay perfectly in sync.

Yes. Evening Warmth gently eases your screen from cool daylight (6500K) down to warm candlelight (1900K), on its own schedule or all the time. The transition is gradual, so there are no jarring shifts, and it resets automatically at sunrise. You can leave Night Shift on: Solace pauses it while warmth is active and restores it afterwards, and a Compatibility Mode brings warmth to the newest MacBook Pros.

You choose. The "Starts at" badge in the Warmth section offers three options: a fixed time (from 3:00 PM to midnight in half-hour steps; 8:00 PM is the default), Sunset (it follows your local sunset, including any offset you have set), or Always for round-the-clock warmth. Warmth eases in gradually over about 15 minutes rather than snapping, and returns to neutral at sunrise. Drag the slider any time to preview a warmth level instantly.

No, leave Night Shift exactly as it is. While Evening Warmth is active, Solace pauses Night Shift so the two never fight over your screen, and keeps re-asserting your chosen warmth if macOS tries to interfere. When warmth ends, or you quit Solace, your original Night Shift setting is restored exactly as you had it. On the newest MacBook Pros, Compatibility Mode goes one step further and delivers warmth through Night Shift itself.

Yes. The default is Cmd Shift D, which toggles light and dark from any app. To change it, open the Solace panel and click the shortcut shown in the footer; it switches to "Press keys...", and whatever combination you press next becomes the new shortcut, saved instantly. Press Escape to cancel recording. If a combination will not register, another app has probably claimed it, so pick a different one.

Solace is a one-time $4.99. No subscription, no in-app purchases, and every future update is included free, with no upsells. Buy it once and it is yours forever, and it is backed by the same 14-day money-back guarantee as every THEODORE HQ app.

You can download the latest version any time from theodorehq.com/solace/download.html. Install it, launch it, and enter the licence key from your purchase confirmation email. After that, Solace keeps itself up to date automatically in the background. Cannot find your key? Check the confirmation email from Polar, our checkout partner, or email support and we will help.

Your licence key activates Solace on up to 3 Macs, so your desktop and laptop are both covered. If you ever hit the limit or need to move to a new machine, email support@theodorehq.com and we will sort it out.

Usually there is nothing to move: your key works on up to 3 Macs, so install Solace on the new machine, enter the same key, and click Activate License. If you see "Activation Limit Reached", it means all 3 slots are in use; email support@theodorehq.com and we will free up the old machine's slot for you, typically within a day. Your key is in the purchase confirmation email from Polar, our checkout partner.

No account needed, ever. Once activated, your key is kept in the macOS Keychain, the same encrypted store your Mac uses for passwords, so it stays put across restarts and updates. You can confirm your status any time via the info button in the panel footer: a green Licensed dot means all is well. Do keep your purchase confirmation email from Polar as a backup copy of the key, in case you ever set up a new Mac.

Yes. Everything core runs on your Mac: switching, scheduling, wallpapers, and warmth all work offline. Solace verifies its licence quietly in the background and is happy to go up to 7 days between checks, so a flight or a week off-grid is no problem. After 7 days fully offline it asks for a brief connection to reconfirm the key, then the clock resets. Weather mode and update checks naturally need the internet when they run.

Yes. Solace comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee: only keep it if you love it. Just email us within 14 days for a full refund. No forms, no hoops, no friction, and a real person, not a bot, replies within a day.

Nearly always a copying slip. Open your purchase confirmation email from Polar and copy-paste the whole key rather than typing it; it starts with SOLACE- followed by blocks of letters and numbers. Solace tidies up stray spaces and lowercase letters for you, but a missing character will read as invalid. If you get a network error instead, check your connection and try again. Still stuck, or can't find the email? Write to support@theodorehq.com and we will look up your purchase.

Three quick checks. First, open the Solace panel: on a new install, Solace politely asks before its very first switch, so answer the "Switch to Dark Mode?" prompt if it is waiting. Second, the Automation permission: go to System Settings, Privacy & Security, Automation, and make sure Solace is allowed to control System Events; Solace also shows an alert with an Open Settings button whenever this is the blocker. Third, for solar scheduling, check the Schedule section shows your sunrise and sunset times, which need Location Services.

Solar times are calculated from your location, right on your Mac. If they look off, the usual cause is location: Macs need Wi-Fi turned on to find where they are. Solace tells you exactly why location is not working, with steps to fix it, so open the menu bar panel and follow the message there. Once location resolves, times recalculate immediately.

Solace points at your chosen image files where they live, so if a file is moved, renamed, or deleted, that pairing stops. Solace tells you with a "Wallpaper Not Found" note naming the file; open the Wallpapers section and pick the image again to fix it in seconds. Files in iCloud Drive, Google Drive, or Dropbox get special care: if they have not downloaded yet after a restart, Solace fetches them and retries on its own. Tip: keep wallpapers somewhere permanent, like your Pictures folder.

That is weather mode doing its job: this morning's forecast crossed your cloud threshold, so the day runs dark. Easy to undo. Click Keep Light on the notification, or tap the mode card at the top of the panel; your choice then holds for the rest of the day. To make it happen less often, set sensitivity to Gloomy in the Weather section (dark only from 90% cloud cover), or switch weather mode off entirely. Curious what triggered it? The info button, then Weather Decisions, shows the exact numbers.

Weather needs your location, so start there: if the panel says "Location not available", make sure Wi-Fi is on (Macs locate themselves via Wi-Fi) and follow the guidance in the Schedule section; weather refreshes automatically the moment location resolves. If you see "Weather unavailable - please try again later", Apple's weather service is having a brief moment; Solace retries every hour on its own, or flip the Weather toggle off and on to refresh immediately. Your last daily decision stays in effect meanwhile, so nothing flickers.

The usual cause is another app holding the same combination; macOS gives a global shortcut to whichever app claimed it first. Open the Solace panel, click the shortcut in the footer, and record a different combination; it registers immediately, so you can test it straight away. If Solace shows an Accessibility alert instead, click Open Settings and allow Solace under Privacy & Security, Accessibility, then record the shortcut again.

A macOS quirk on the newest MacBook Pros blocks the usual warming method, and Solace has a built-in answer: Compatibility Mode, which delivers the same warmth through a different route. On affected Macs, Solace shows a "Use Compatibility Mode" prompt right in the Warmth section the moment you use warmth; one click and you are done. You can also flip it manually any time via the small gear icon in the Warmth section header. Your slider level and schedule stay exactly as they were.

Email support@theodorehq.com. A real person, not a bot, reads every message and usually replies within a day. Whether it is a question, a bug report, or an idea for Solace, we would love to hear from you. You can also report a bug, request a feature, leave a testimonial, or follow the roadmap right here on the Support Centre, and Solace links straight to it from the Support section of its About panel.

Completely. Solace collects nothing about you: no account, no tracking, no analytics. Your location never leaves your Mac, and solar times are calculated locally on your device. If you enable weather mode, Solace checks Apple's WeatherKit for the forecast, and that is it. None of your data is ever sent to us.

Three things only. A periodic licence check with Polar, our checkout partner, which needs a connection about once a week at most. Apple's WeatherKit, but only if you switch weather mode on. And a quiet check of our website for app updates. That is the complete list: no analytics, no tracking, no crash reporters, and nothing about you or your usage is ever sent to us. Turn weather mode off and Solace touches the internet even less.

Location is used for exactly one calculation: your local sunrise and sunset times, worked out on your Mac so solar scheduling and weather mode know your daylight hours. It is optional; you can skip it during setup and grant it later from the Schedule section. Without it, solar and weather scheduling pause, but everything else works: manual switching, the keyboard shortcut, wallpaper pairs, and Evening Warmth at a fixed start time. Your coordinates never touch our servers.

Charm is a private writing assistant that runs entirely on your Mac. Three features work together: Spells catches typos the moment you press space, Polish quietly fixes grammar like missing full stops and lowercase starts, and Oracle predicts your next word, with Tab to accept. On top of that there is text replacement, emoji replacement, and a personal dictionary that learns your vocabulary. Each feature can be toggled independently.

Charm runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. The app itself is tiny, around 18 MB. The on-device AI model adds a one-time download of about 1.5 GB for the lite model or 1.7 GB for the recommended one. The lite model needs a Mac with 8 GB of memory; the recommended model needs 16 GB. Charm checks this before downloading, so it will only offer models your Mac can comfortably run. Spelling correction works even without a model installed.

Download Charm from theodorehq.com/charm/download, open the DMG, and drag Charm into Applications. On first launch a setup guide walks you through everything: entering the license key from your purchase email, granting the two macOS permissions (Accessibility and Input Monitoring), downloading the on-device AI model, and a quick tour of how Charm behaves in different apps. The whole thing takes a few minutes, and Charm then lives quietly in your menu bar. If you ever want a refresher, the interactive guide at theodorehq.com/charm/try covers every feature in about two minutes.

Charm corrects text inside other apps, which macOS only allows through two permissions. Input Monitoring lets Charm notice when you finish a word, so it knows the right moment to check spelling. Accessibility lets Charm read the word you just typed and replace it in place with the correction. Without both, Charm cannot see or fix anything. Both are granted in System Settings > Privacy & Security, and they sit in two separate lists there. Everything Charm reads stays on your Mac: nothing you type is ever stored or sent anywhere, and password fields are skipped entirely.

Yes. Native Mac apps get Automatic mode, where Charm corrects inline as you type with no setup. Web browsers and Electron apps handle text differently, so there Charm uses Fix Selection: press Option-Command-V and it fixes the whole field in one pass, no selecting needed. Charm sets the right mode for every app automatically and picks up newly installed apps on launch, and you can override any app in Settings. If you would rather have live correction in a browser, set it to Automatic in Settings and Charm will keep it there. It is best-effort in browsers, so the odd correction may not apply, but Fix Selection always works too.

No. Charm is lightweight at idle. On first launch it downloads a local AI model, around 1.5 GB for the lite version or 1.7 GB for the recommended one, one time only. After that everything runs locally with minimal CPU usage, and corrections land in under 200ms.

Yes. All corrections and predictions run on your Mac using a local AI model, so Charm works fully offline: on a plane, on a train, anywhere. You only need a connection three times: downloading the app, downloading the AI model on first run, and activating your licence key. After that, Charm quietly reconfirms your licence in the background when you happen to be online, and it is happy to run fully offline for up to 7 days at a time. Away longer than that? Just connect once and it revalidates automatically, no key re-entry needed; your key is stored securely in the macOS Keychain. Updates also download automatically whenever you are connected.

Press Ctrl-Option-C to toggle all of Charm on or off instantly, from any app. The menu bar icon changes so you can see the current state at a glance. You can change this shortcut in Settings > Customise > Keyboard Shortcuts, and you can also record separate shortcuts there to toggle individual features: Spells, Polish, Oracle, or emoji replacement. Each one shows a small confirmation when pressed, so you always know what just changed. The menu bar popover has the same toggles if you prefer clicking.

Open Settings > Development, where you will find a Support section. From there you can Report a Bug, Request a Feature, Leave a Testimonial, Review Roadmap, or open the FAQ Section. Each one takes you straight to the relevant page on the Support Centre in your browser, so you can see what has already been raised, add your own, and follow along. If you would rather include a diagnostic report with a bug, grab it first from Settings > Diagnostics (Copy or Send Feedback), then attach it. Everything is read and answered by a real person.

Fix Selection is Charm's on-demand cleanup. Select some text and press Option-Command-V, and Charm fixes spelling, grammar, capitalisation, and punctuation in one pass. With nothing selected, it fixes the entire text field. It works everywhere, including web browsers and apps like Slack where live correction is not possible, and you can press Esc to cancel while it is working. It is also polite: in chat apps it never adds a full stop to the end of your message. You can change the shortcut in Settings > Customise > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Oracle predicts your word after you have typed three or more letters and pause for a moment. The suggested ending appears highlighted right in your text: press Tab to accept it, Esc to dismiss it, or just keep typing to replace it. Oracle is off by default, so switch it on in the menu bar popover when you want it. It gets smarter as you write: real words you use often become suggestions, and anything you write a few times, from a single word to a short sign-off, can be completed with a single Tab. It only ever suggests genuine words, so a stray typo never gets offered back to you. It deliberately skips very common short words, and stays out of search bars and address bars.

Press Command-Backspace (or Command-Z) immediately after a correction and your original word comes straight back. Charm then offers to add that word to your personal dictionary: press Y to add it so it is never corrected again, or N to dismiss. Press Backspace again quickly and Charm deletes the whole word for you, ready to retype. The undo window lasts a few seconds after each correction, and once you keep typing, normal Command-Z behaviour returns to the app. Charm also remembers what you undo, so a correction you reject twice stops being suggested.

Add it to your personal dictionary. The quickest way: when Charm corrects the word, press Command-Backspace to undo, then Y when Charm asks whether to remember it. You can also add and remove words directly in Settings > Personal. Dictionary words are never flagged again in any app, and Charm even protects them during grammar fixes. It also respects your capitalisation: add "Bauhaus" and typing "bauhaus" gets promoted to your preferred form. Names, brands, slang, project codenames, whatever you write, Charm learns your vocabulary.

Yes. In Settings > Personal you can create replacement pairs: type a short trigger and Charm expands it the moment you finish the word. Make "addr" your postal address, "@@" your email, or "sig" your signature. Replacements work across your apps, including web browsers and chat apps, and matching ignores capitalisation. If an expansion ever fires when you did not want it, press Command-Backspace straight away to undo it. You can add, edit, and remove shortcuts any time.

With emoji replacement on, typing certain words converts them to the matching emoji: "coffee" becomes the coffee cup, "magic" becomes sparkles. Only lowercase words trigger it, and some two-word phrases work too. If Charm converts a word you wanted as text, press Command-Backspace to undo, and Charm will ask whether it should stop converting that word for good. Your exclusions are listed in Settings > Personal, where you can remove one to bring the emoji back. You can also switch emoji replacement off entirely, globally or just for specific apps and websites.

Yes, completely. Open Settings > Customise. Under Apps you can set any app to Automatic (corrects as you type) or Manual (corrects only when you press Option-Command-V), and switch spelling, grammar, prediction, and emoji on or off individually for that app. Under Websites you can do the same per domain, so you could keep prediction on in Gmail but off in Google Docs. Rules Charm created automatically carry an Auto badge so you can tell them apart from your own, and one click resets the automatic ones.

Charm currently supports English (UK) and English (US), switchable in Settings. It picks the right variant automatically from your Mac's language settings, so British users get "colour" accepted and American users get "color" accepted, and every correction respects the variant you chose. One nice touch: whichever variant you use, Charm never converts your currency symbols, so quoting $ amounts in British English is always safe. Support for more languages is on our roadmap; if there is one you would love to see, tell us on the feedback board or at support@theodorehq.com.

Charm offers two on-device models. Gemma 2 2B (about 1.5 GB) is best for speed and runs on Macs with 8 GB of memory. Qwen 2.5 3B (about 1.7 GB) gives smarter grammar and context and wants 16 GB. Only one is loaded at a time, and you can switch or remove models whenever you like in Settings > General under AI Engine. Charm checks your Mac's memory before offering a model, so you cannot pick one your machine cannot handle. Spelling correction works even with no model installed; the model powers the grammar pass and the trickiest spelling calls.

Yes, in a few ways, all stored locally. Corrections you accept a couple of times become instant. If Charm ever corrects a word to the wrong thing and you fix it to what you actually meant, it learns your word and gives you that next time. Corrections you undo are remembered too, so Charm stops making that change. For prediction, real words you type often become suggestions (it never offers a typo back to you), and anything you write a few times, from a single word to a short sign-off, can be offered in full with one Tab. You stay in charge of all of it: Settings > Personal lists the words you've taught Charm and your learned phrases, where you can search them, add or edit your own, and remove or reset any entry.

Yes. Each correction appears with a soft glow, and Settings > Appearance lets you make it yours. Choose any glow colour from the full colour spectrum, and pick an animation style: Subtle (the default), Playful for a little more delight, or None if you would rather corrections happen invisibly. Charm follows your Mac's light and dark mode automatically. If you are curious what got corrected, Settings > History keeps a log of your recent corrections along with counters for today and all time.

Yes. If Charm corrects a word to the wrong thing and you replace it with the word you actually meant, Charm learns that pairing and gives you your word next time instead. This is handy for words you often mistype in the same way, where the built-in checker lands on a close but wrong word. It kicks in after you have done the same fix a couple of times, so a one-off edit never sticks, and it only ever learns a real word. You can see and remove everything it has picked up in Settings > Personal > Taught. It all stays on your Mac.

Yes. Charm shows short messages near the top of your screen to tell you what it has done, such as confirming your corrected text is on the clipboard. If your menu bar or an app's toolbar is busy up there, open Settings > Appearance and drag Message Position to the height that suits you, anywhere from just under the menu bar down to the middle of the screen. A live preview follows the slider as you drag, so you can place it against your own screen rather than guess, and your choice is remembered for every future session. This is separate from the correction glow: moving your messages does not change how corrections themselves look as you type.

Charm is a one-time purchase, normally $19.99 and currently $9.99 as a launch offer, with no subscription and every feature included. There is no separate free trial because every purchase carries a 14-day money-back guarantee: buy it, use it for two weeks, and if it is not for you, email support@theodorehq.com for a full refund. That is your risk-free trial.

Three quick checks fix almost every case. First, make sure it is a Charm key: it starts with CHARM followed by groups of letters and numbers. A key from one of our other apps (like Solace) will politely tell you it belongs to a different product. Second, copy and paste the entire key from your Polar purchase email rather than retyping it; Charm ignores spaces and capitalisation, but every character matters. Third, activation needs a brief internet connection, so check you are online. Still stuck? Email support@theodorehq.com and we will sort it quickly.

Up to 3, and your licence is tied to the key, not the machine, so replacing a Mac is painless. Updates are automatic too: Charm checks in the background and offers new versions with one click to install, free forever with your licence. You can download the latest version any time at theodorehq.com/charm/download.

Each Charm licence activates up to 3 Macs. If you have replaced a machine and see the activation limit message, just email support@theodorehq.com from your purchase email address with your licence key, and we will free up the slot from the old Mac, usually within a day. Activations belong to the key, not the machine, so nothing else changes: your settings, dictionary, and learned corrections all live on each Mac and are unaffected.

Charm needs two macOS permissions: Accessibility and Input Monitoring, both switched on in System Settings > Privacy & Security. They sit in two separate lists, so it is easy to have one on and the other off. After enabling both, quit and reopen Charm so macOS registers them. To confirm it is working, type teh followed by a space in any native Mac app; it should become the.

macOS reads permissions when an app launches, so a freshly granted toggle often is not noticed until Charm restarts. Charm offers a one-click Relaunch when this happens; otherwise quit from the menu bar and reopen. If the warning persists after that, the permission entry itself is usually stale, which can happen after a macOS update: open System Settings > Privacy & Security, go into Accessibility and Input Monitoring, remove Charm from the list with the minus button, add it back, switch it on, and relaunch. Charm's warning always names exactly which of the two permissions is still missing, and its Fix button opens the right pane.

That is by design. Web browsers and apps built on web technology (Slack, Notion, Discord, VS Code, and many more) handle text in a way that does not allow safe live rewriting, so Charm automatically sets them to Manual mode. Type as normal, then press Option-Command-V and Charm fixes the whole field in one pass, spelling and grammar together, no selecting needed. Charm configures this automatically for every such app, including ones you install later, and shows a one-time tip the first time you type in one. You can override any app's mode in Settings > Customise.

When both Charm and the built-in macOS autocorrect are on, the two engines can react to the same keystroke, which occasionally shows up as doubled words or odd cursor jumps. The clean setup is one engine: open System Settings > Keyboard > Text and turn off the built-in correction, then let Charm handle everything. Charm makes this easy: when it notices system autocorrect is on, it shows a small banner in the popover with a Fix button that takes you straight to the right settings pane. Charm never changes your system settings itself; that choice is always yours.

First, check Oracle is switched on in the menu bar popover; prediction is off by default so it never surprises anyone. If it is on, remember Oracle is deliberately selective. It needs at least three typed letters, only suggests when the ending saves you three or more characters, and skips very common words. When you are typing quickly it only offers longer words, because interrupting fluent typing costs more than it saves. It also stays out of search bars, browser address bars, single-line web form fields, launchers like Raycast and Spotlight, terminals, and password fields. Pause briefly mid-word in a normal document and suggestions will appear.

Charm watches whether its corrections actually land cleanly in each app. If an app repeatedly refuses them (some apps handle text in unusual ways), Charm switches that app to Manual mode so your typing is never disrupted, and shows a small notice with an Undo button. Tap Undo to put the app straight back, and Charm respects that choice for the rest of the session. You can also change any app's mode in Settings > Customise, where automatically created rules carry an Auto badge and can be reset in one click. Prefer Charm never to manage modes for you? Turn off Smart Mode Selection in the same tab.

Terminals are the one place Charm deliberately never touches, and there is no setting to change that. In a terminal, every character is a live command rather than prose, so automatic corrections, predictions, or even an on-demand fix could alter or run commands you did not intend. Charm recognises all the popular terminals, including Terminal, iTerm2, Warp, kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, and Ghostty, and stands down completely in them. Everywhere else on your Mac works as normal.

For a failed download, just retry from Settings > General under AI Engine: Charm automatically clears any partial download first, so a retry always starts clean. The error message tells you whether the cause was your connection, disk space, or memory. If Charm disappeared while loading a model, that means your Mac ran out of memory for it; on next launch Charm detects this, explains which model struggled, and steps back so it cannot happen in a loop. In that case choose the lighter Gemma 2 2B model, or run without a model; spelling correction works fine either way.

No. The AI model unloads itself after 5 minutes without a correction, freeing that memory completely, and reloads invisibly the next time it is needed. Memory during inference is tightly capped too. In browsers, Charm keeps its footprint deliberately small: it only inspects page details when you have actually created per-website rules, and recent updates significantly reduced how much work happens while you type in a browser. If anything ever feels heavy, make sure you are on the latest version (Settings > General > Check for Updates), then email support@theodorehq.com and we will take a look.

Open Settings > Diagnostics. You will see Charm's recent activity log: permission status, model events, and anything unusual, capped at the last 200 entries. Press Copy to put the whole report on your clipboard, then paste it into your email to support@theodorehq.com, or use Send Feedback which drafts the email for you (and copies the full log to your clipboard as a backup, since some mail apps truncate long messages). The log records events only, never the text you type, so it is always safe to share. A Clear button wipes it whenever you like.

Email support@theodorehq.com. A real person, not a bot, reads every message and usually replies within a day. Whether it is a question, a bug report, or an idea for Charm, we would love to hear from you. You can also report bugs, request features, and vote on ideas right here on the feedback board.

No. Everything Charm does happens entirely on your Mac using a local AI model, and it works fully offline. Nothing you type is ever stored or sent anywhere: no servers, no cloud, no account, no tracking. Charm only acts on the text you are actively writing, stays out of your browser's address and search bars, and skips password fields entirely.

No. Charm detects password fields several ways and never reads, corrects, or predicts in them. It recognises secure fields in native Mac apps and in every major browser, honours the system-wide secure input mode that password prompts switch on, and as an extra safety net it treats any masked field showing dots as off-limits too. The same protection covers everything: live correction, word prediction, phrase learning, and Fix Selection all stand down the moment a password field has focus. And since Charm runs entirely on your Mac with no cloud and no logging of typed text, there is nowhere for anything sensitive to go anyway.

Charm keeps a small amount of data locally so it can serve you better: your settings and per-app rules, your personal dictionary and text replacements, the corrections it has learned from you, short phrases and word frequencies for prediction, a log of your last 100 corrections, and a diagnostic event log. Your licence key lives in the secure macOS Keychain. None of it ever leaves your Mac. Everything is inspectable and clearable: Settings > Personal manages the dictionary, replacements, and learned data, Settings > History clears the correction log, and Settings > Diagnostics clears the event log.

Exactly three things use a connection, and none of them include your text. First, downloading the on-device AI model when you set up or switch models. Second, activating and occasionally revalidating your licence key with our payment provider Polar; that request carries the key and your Mac's name so you can recognise the device, nothing more. Third, checking for app updates from our website. Everything else, every correction, prediction, and piece of learning, happens entirely on your Mac. There are no analytics, no telemetry, and no account.

Shiny needs macOS 13 (Ventura) or newer and runs natively on both Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, M4) and Intel Macs as a Universal app. Same app, same licence, no separate downloads. Not sure which macOS you have? Click the Apple menu and choose About This Mac to check.

Open the downloaded file and drag Shiny into your Applications folder - it needs to live there, that part matters. Open it, and Shiny walks you through two quick steps: approving its small background helper in System Settings (this is what lets it actually free memory) and pasting the license key from your purchase email. That's it. Shiny then lives quietly in your menu bar as a little twelve-tick dial, ready whenever your Mac needs a polish.

During setup, Shiny opens System Settings for you. Go to General, then Login Items & Extensions, scroll to "Allow in the Background", and turn Shiny on. macOS may ask for your admin password. This approves the small helper that does the actual memory cleanup - freeing memory needs a level of access that macOS rightly keeps behind your say-so. Once you flip the toggle, just come back to Shiny; the setup window notices on its own and moves you along.

That's macOS asking, not Shiny - and it's a good sign. The deep memory cleanup uses a built-in macOS tool that only runs with your explicit approval, so the system asks for your admin password once when you switch Shiny on under "Allow in the Background". Shiny never sees or stores your password; macOS handles the whole exchange. After that one approval, every Polish works silently with no further prompts. The helper is removed automatically if you ever move Shiny to the Trash.

Polish does its work in a few seconds: it settles anything waiting to be written to disk, asks macOS to release the memory apps are no longer using (via the system's own built-in cleanup tool), and refreshes stale network lookups that can make browsing feel sluggish. Then it shows you how much lighter your Mac is - the real measured number, never an inflated one. If you've turned on "Quit hidden apps on Polish", it also politely closes apps with no windows open. And if music or a call is playing, Shiny holds off the deep clean so your audio stays smooth.

The dial is a live gauge of how your Mac feels. Twelve ticks fill as things get busier: green means comfortable, amber (from about half full) means starting to fill up, red (from about 80%) means it's time to polish. It measures the slowdowns you actually feel - not just how much RAM is in use, because a busy-looking Mac can still feel perfectly fine. After a Polish it dips to a calm mint and eases back to the honest reading over a few minutes. A greyed-out dial just means setup isn't finished; click it to continue.

Yes. Press Option-Shift-C from any app and Shiny runs a Polish right away - no need to reach for the menu bar. To pick your own combination, open Shiny's Settings (the gear in the popover), choose General, click the Global Hotkey row, and press the keys you want. Any combination with at least one modifier key works, and Escape cancels recording if you change your mind.

Updates take care of themselves. Shiny quietly checks for new versions about once an hour and offers them when they're ready - every update is cryptographically verified before it installs, so you always get the genuine article. Want to check right now? Open Settings, choose About, and press "Check Now", or right-click the menu bar dial and pick "Check for Updates". All updates are included with your license, forever, at no extra cost.

No - this is something Shiny is genuinely careful about. Before the deep clean, it checks whether your Mac is actually playing sound (music, a video, a call). If it is, Shiny does a lighter tidy instead and tells you so: "Held off the deep polish so your audio stays smooth." The same courtesy applies to Auto-polish, so background polishes never stutter your playlist or your meeting. Once the audio stops, the very next Polish does the full job. On macOS 14.2 or later the listening check is at its most precise.

When your Mac is filling up, the popover adds a line like "Safari and Slack are using the most right now." Shiny adds up everything each app is really using, including its hidden helper processes, so Chrome's many helpers count as Chrome. It only ever names apps you'd actually recognise - never cryptic system processes. Each name is clickable: click it, confirm, and Shiny asks that app to quit as politely as Cmd-Q would, so it can save your work first. The app isn't gone; you can reopen it any time.

With Auto-polish on (Settings, then General), Shiny watches for the moment macOS itself reports memory pressure and quietly runs a polish for you - no click needed. It waits at least five minutes between automatic polishes, so it never churns away in the background. It's also thoughtful about timing: if you're listening to music or on a call, it holds off the deep clean so your audio stays perfectly smooth. While Auto-polish is on, the "your Mac is full" nudge notifications stay quiet, since Shiny is already handling it.

With this setting on (Settings, then General), each Polish also asks apps that have no windows on screen to quit - the ones sitting invisibly in the background holding onto memory. The ask is always polite, exactly like pressing Cmd-Q yourself: apps get the chance to save their work and can show a save prompt if they need to. Nothing is ever force-quit, and anything with a window you're actually using is left alone. It's off by default, so Polish only does this if you choose it.

Open Settings and choose Sneaky Apps to see everything that runs on your Mac without you opening it - login items, background helpers, and auto-updaters, each named in plain English with a short note on what it does and how heavy it is right now. The heaviest sit at the top. You can pause items you don't need, quit ones that are running, and remove leftovers from apps you deleted long ago. Apple's own system processes are tucked away, since those are safe and shouldn't be touched.

When you delete an app, it sometimes leaves behind a startup entry that still asks macOS to launch something that no longer exists. Shiny checks each entry against what's actually on your disk, and flags the orphans as "Leftover, safe to remove". Click Remove (or "Remove all" in the banner) to clear them. Every removal comes with a six-second Undo button, and Shiny sets the entry aside first rather than deleting it outright, so an accidental click is never final within that window.

Yes. In Settings, open Sneaky Apps. When Shiny spots auto-updaters running in the background, a banner offers "Pause all", or you can Disable them one at a time. Pausing is completely reversible - Shiny sets the startup entry aside rather than deleting anything, so an Enable click brings it straight back. The apps themselves keep working normally; you'd simply update them by opening them, instead of having their updaters idling in the background all day.

Gentle nudges (Settings, then Notifications) send a single quiet notification when your Mac crosses into genuinely-full territory: "Your Mac is feeling full. A quick polish should help." with a Polish Now button right on it. It fires once per episode, waits at least 30 minutes before repeating, and respects Focus modes when "Stay quiet during Focus" is on. If you'd previously declined notifications for Shiny in macOS, allow them under System Settings, Notifications, Shiny, then flip the toggle back on. Nudges also stay silent while Auto-polish is handling things for you.

An ambient cue that lives on the screen itself. Turn on "Soft edge glow" (Settings, then Screen) and the edges of every display take on a soft, warm tint when your Mac is very close to full - the kindest possible way to be told it's time to polish. It fades away on its own as soon as pressure drops. The glow is purely visual, sits behind your work, and is off by default, so nothing appears unless you invite it.

Yes. Right-click the Shiny dial in your menu bar and you'll find Restart Dock and Restart Finder - handy classics when the Dock stops responding or Finder windows misbehave. macOS relaunches both automatically within a second or two, so nothing is lost; your windows and desktop come straight back. The same right-click menu also gives you Polish Now, Check for Updates, and a quick jump to the Login Items page in System Settings.

One-time. $4.99 once covers Shiny on up to three Macs, forever, with all future updates included. No recurring charges, no auto-renewals, no Pro tier upsells. Every purchase also carries a 14-day money-back guarantee: email us within 14 days and a real person will sort your refund, no questions asked.

No account, ever - your license key is the whole story. Internet is only needed for two things: activating the key, and a quick occasional check that it's still valid. Between checks, Shiny happily runs offline for up to 7 days. If you're away from a connection longer, Shiny shows a small "Running offline" note in Settings under About, with a countdown of the days remaining, and everything keeps working. The moment you're back online, the check completes silently and the countdown disappears.

No. Once activated, your license is stored in the macOS Keychain - the same protected vault that holds your Wi-Fi passwords - so it survives app updates and even deleting and reinstalling Shiny on the same Mac. Updates delivered through Shiny's built-in updater never touch it. You'd only enter the key again on a brand-new Mac or after erasing this one, and it's always waiting in your purchase email from Polar.sh with the subject "Your Shiny license" if you need it.

Your license covers up to three Macs at once, so often you can simply enter your key on the new Mac and carry on. If all three slots are in use, visit polar.sh/purchases, sign in with your purchase email, and deactivate the Mac you're retiring - that frees a slot instantly. Then paste your key into Shiny on the new machine and tap Activate. Selling or wiping the old Mac? Deactivating from the Polar page works even if you no longer have access to it.

This simply means your key is already active on three Macs - the maximum for one Shiny license - so a fourth needs a slot freed first. Head to polar.sh/purchases, sign in with the email you bought with, find your Shiny license, and deactivate a Mac you no longer use. Then come back to Shiny and tap Activate again; it goes through immediately. If you think the three slots don't add up (say, a Mac you erased still holds one), the same page lets you release it.

Shiny still gave your Mac a gentle tidy, and it's telling you the deep clean is waiting on one approval. Click the Open Settings button under that message (or open System Settings yourself), go to General, then Login Items & Extensions, scroll to "Allow in the Background", and turn Shiny on - macOS may ask for your admin password. That's the whole fix. Come back and press Polish again; from then on every polish is the full one.

First, click over to Shiny (or click its menu bar dial) - it re-checks the moment it comes forward, and usually that's all it takes. If it still says waiting, macOS occasionally holds the approval in a stuck state on its side. Shiny has a purpose-built fix: open Settings, choose About, and press Reinstall next to Background Helper. That re-registers the helper and verifies it's genuinely answering. If System Settings opens afterwards, flip the Shiny toggle once more and you're done.

That's Shiny being honest, and it's usually good news. The "% lighter" figure is measured for real: memory in use the instant before the polish versus the instant after. If your Mac wasn't under memory pressure, there was little to reclaim - macOS was already managing well. Shiny even hides the number below 2% rather than dress up a nothing-result as a win. You'll see the big numbers exactly when they matter: when the dial is amber or red and your Mac genuinely feels slow.

That is Gatekeeper, macOS being cautious about any app downloaded outside the App Store. It is not a problem with Shiny, which is notarized by Apple, meaning Apple scans it for malware before you download it. Right-click the app, choose Open, and you are set. It runs as a normal app from then on, same as Notes or Calendar.

macOS only allows an app to run a background helper when the app lives in the Applications folder - it's a security guarantee from Apple, not a Shiny preference. This usually appears when Shiny is being run straight from the downloaded disk image or from the Downloads folder. The fix takes ten seconds: quit Shiny, drag Shiny.app into Applications (the setup screen's "Open Applications" button takes you right there), open it from its new home, and press Install Helper again. Setup continues exactly where you left off.

There are only two reasons, and hovering over the button tells you which. If your Mac is feeling great, the button rests and the hover message reads "Nothing to polish. Enjoy the calm." - that's Shiny declining to do pointless work, and it wakes up the moment the dial leaves green. If instead the hover mentions the background helper, it needs its one-time approval: open System Settings, General, Login Items & Extensions, and turn Shiny on under "Allow in the Background". Polish springs to life right after.

Perfectly normal, and Shiny handles most of it for you. After an app update, macOS sometimes resets its record of background helpers, so Shiny automatically refreshes its helper on the first launch of every new version. Usually that's invisible. Occasionally macOS wants your approval confirmed again - if so, Shiny opens the right System Settings page; just flip the Shiny toggle on under "Allow in the Background". You'll be asked at most once per update, and everything you've set up stays exactly as it was.

Removing or pausing a system-level item goes through Shiny's background helper, and this message means the helper didn't answer in time - Shiny already tried an automatic recovery and a retry for you. The reliable fix: open Settings, choose About, press Reinstall next to Background Helper, wait a moment for "Installed and ready", then repeat the remove. If a toast says the helper needs approval instead, tap its Open Settings button and turn Shiny on under "Allow in the Background". Your list refreshes to show exactly what's true on disk, so nothing is left half-done.

Shiny checks its helper every time it launches and quietly repairs it on its own - twice, in fact - before ever bothering you. This notification means it would like one tap of help. Tap Reinstall right on the notification; that's the correct fix in the most common case and takes a couple of seconds. If macOS then asks for approval, tap Open Settings instead and turn Shiny on under "Allow in the Background" in Login Items & Extensions. Shiny won't nag: this notification appears at most once a day.

Shiny keeps a note of what happened, and the next time it opens you'll see a small report window with the details laid out for you to read. If you'd like us to look into it, one click opens a pre-addressed email to support@theodorehq.com in your own mail app - you can read exactly what's in it before sending, and a real person replies. Nothing is ever transmitted automatically or behind the scenes; if you dismiss the window, the report simply stays on your Mac.

Open Shiny's Settings, choose About, and click Diagnostics Log - Finder opens with the file selected, ready to attach to an email to support@theodorehq.com. The log is a small text file of timestamped events that lives only on your Mac (in your Library's Logs folder) and is kept trimmed to about 1 MB, so it never grows large. Nothing in it is ever sent anywhere unless you choose to send it yourself, and including it helps us give you a precise answer first time.

Email support@theodorehq.com. A real person, not a bot, reads every message and usually replies within a day. Lost your licence key? Email from the address you bought with and we will resend it. You can also report bugs, request features, leave a testimonial, and follow the roadmap from the Support tab in Shiny's settings, or right here in the Support Centre.

No analytics, no telemetry, no ads, no account, no tracking of any kind. Exactly two things ever leave your Mac, and you can verify both with a tool like Little Snitch. One: a check with theodorehq.com about once an hour to see if a new version exists. Two: a brief exchange with Polar, the payment provider, to activate your license and occasionally confirm it's still valid - Shiny runs happily offline for up to a week between checks. That's the complete list. Even crash reports only leave your Mac if you press send yourself.

Never. Shiny looks at exactly three kinds of information, all on your Mac: the list of running apps (the same one Activity Monitor shows), your Mac's own memory, processor, and temperature readings, and the list of startup items for the Sneaky Apps tab. Your files, photos, messages, and browsing are never opened, read, or changed - the polish itself only asks macOS to let go of memory the system has already marked as reclaimable. Everything Shiny observes stays on the machine and is forgotten as it refreshes.

The helper is a tiny, single-purpose tool that ships inside Shiny and does nothing until Shiny asks. Its whole job list: run the built-in macOS memory-release command, refresh stale network name lookups, politely ask an app to quit when you choose to, set aside the startup entries you pause or remove in Sneaky Apps (reversibly, never deleted outright), and read the startup-items list for that tab. It checks that requests genuinely come from Shiny before acting, never touches the network, never reads your files, and is removed automatically when you move Shiny to the Trash.

Atlas puts your whole group on one living world map, with everyone's local time, daylight and working hours. It scores every 15-minute slot across the next five working days and floats the best overlap to the top, or you can scrub the map to pick your own moment. One tap then writes the meeting to your calendar with everyone's local time included.

No, only you need it. Atlas creates the event in your calendar, and you invite the others from there exactly as you normally would - their calendars show the time correctly in their own zone automatically. Atlas also writes each person's local time into the event notes, and drafts a ready-made message ("Let's meet Friday. 8:00 AM for Ben, 5:00 PM for Maya.") you can send by Messages, Mail or anywhere else. Nobody has to install anything.

Yes. One tap adds the meeting to Apple Calendar, or hands off to Google, Outlook or Yahoo, or saves a universal .ics file, whichever you use. Atlas can also read your calendar if you allow it, quietly hiding times that clash with what you have already booked. That access is optional and off by default, and Atlas only ever writes the single event you asked for - never anything in the background.

Download Atlas from theodorehq.com/atlas, open the file and drag Atlas into your Applications folder. On first launch, paste the license key from your purchase email (it starts with ATLAS-) and press Enter. Atlas then walks you through a short setup: set your location, optionally connect your calendar, and add your first person. You are scheduling within a minute or two.

On first launch Atlas asks to use your location, purely to place your pin and set your time zone. Your coordinates go only to Apple Maps to look up your city name; they never touch any Atlas server. Prefer not to share? Skip the prompt and type your city manually instead, during setup or later in Settings under You. Moved or travelling? Tap the Auto-detect Location toggle in Settings and Atlas finds your city again.

Type a city into the search field (or press Cmd+F) and pick from the live suggestions - Atlas looks the place up with Apple Maps, so the time zone is always right. The person appears as a flag pin on the map with their local time. They are named after their city at first; use the inline rename to give them their real name. No email address or account is needed for anyone.

Yes. Groups keep different circles separate: your team, a client project, family. Press Cmd+N for a new group, Cmd+S to name it, and Cmd+1 to Cmd+9 to jump straight to one; Ctrl+Tab cycles through them. Drag groups in the drawer to reorder. You appear in every group automatically, each group can wear its own emoji icon, and each can point at its own calendar and choose whether its people show in the menu bar.

Atlas checks for updates automatically about once an hour and offers new versions with the standard macOS update prompt - your groups and settings carry straight over. To check by hand, open Settings, go to About and click Check for Updates. Every update is free, included in the one-time purchase.

The warm amber band shows where the sun is currently above the horizon. The blue band inside it shows where the local time is within working hours right now. Both are drawn around the point where the sun is directly overhead and sweep across the map as time moves. Pin colours follow the same idea: green means that person is inside working hours, amber means within an hour either side, and red means it is out of hours for them.

Atlas checks every 15-minute slot across the next five weekdays and scores each one against every person's working hours - the closer everyone sits to the middle of their day, the better. The time that suits the whole group best floats to the top, with two alternatives beside it. If your calendar is connected, anything that clashes with your existing events is hidden. Suggestions always land on tidy quarter-hour marks, never at 2:07pm.

Absolutely. Hold Cmd and drag anywhere on the map to scrub time forwards or backwards - every pin's clock, the daylight band and the working-hours band all move with you. Release when the moment looks right and that becomes your meeting time. Press Cmd+T to glide back to right now, or Cmd+B to return to Atlas's suggested best time. You can also tap any of the three suggestion cards to switch between them.

Yes. Open the date and duration drawer on the planning card and pick 15, 30, 45, 60 or 90 minutes; 30 is the default. Changing the length re-runs the suggestions straight away, since a 90-minute call needs a bigger overlap between time zones than a quick 15-minute catch-up does.

By default Atlas scans the next five weekdays, skipping Saturday and Sunday. To schedule a weekend call or any particular day, open the date drawer on the planning card and tap the day you want - Atlas then scores every time on that exact date, whatever day of the week it is. Past days stay dimmed and can't be picked.

Yes, once you allow calendar access - it is optional and off by default. Atlas reads the next two weeks of events from the calendars you tick and quietly hides any suggestion that clashes, telling you how many were hidden so you can peek if you want. All-day items like birthdays and holidays are ignored on purpose; only timed events count as busy. Everything is read locally on your Mac and nothing is uploaded.

Once a time is chosen, Atlas writes the message for you: "Let's meet Friday. 8:00 AM for Ben, 5:00 PM for Maya. See you then." - everyone in their own local time. Hit Share to send it by Messages, Mail, Notes or AirDrop, or press Shift+Cmd+C to copy it anywhere. Adding the meeting to your calendar also writes each person's local time into the event notes, so the invite explains itself.

All the big ones. The default hands the event to your Mac's calendar app - Apple Calendar, or Fantastical or BusyCal if one of those is your default. You can instead choose Google Calendar, Outlook (personal or work) or Yahoo, which open in your browser with everything pre-filled, ready to save. Use something else, like Proton or Fastmail? Pick the calendar-file option and Atlas saves a universal file to Downloads that imports into anything. Choose your preference in Settings under Calendar.

Yes. In Settings, under Calendar, the Per Group section lets each group pin its own calendar - family meetings onto your personal iCloud calendar, client calls onto the work Google one. For Google or Outlook, add the account email there too, so the right account opens every time even when you are signed in to several. Groups without a pinned calendar simply follow your global choice.

Yes. Open Settings and adjust the two Working Hours sliders in the You section; the default is 9:00 to 17:00, adjustable in half-hour steps. These hours drive everything: which times Atlas suggests, the blue band on the map, and the green, amber and red pin colours. One thing to know: the same window currently applies to everyone in the group - there are no separate hours per person.

Press Cmd+K for Quick Check. It opens a scratch space seeded with just you - type any city, compare clocks, plan a one-off call, all without touching your saved groups. Press Esc when you are done and it vanishes completely. If the comparison turns out to be worth keeping, press Cmd+S and Atlas saves it as a new group, ready to rename.

That is your team as a tiny constellation: one dot per person, placed by where they are in the world, brighter when they are in working hours. Click it for a quick roster grouped by time of day, from late night through dawn, daytime, dusk and evening, often with a helpful line such as "Maya wraps up her day in 20 minutes." Choose which groups appear there in Settings, and hide the icon entirely under Behaviour if you prefer.

Yes. Atlas is a one-time $4.99 purchase with no subscription and no upgrade fees. One licence covers up to three Macs, and you can deactivate a Mac in Settings to free a slot for a new one. Every future update is included. It needs macOS 13 Ventura or later and runs natively on Apple Silicon, with Intel supported.

Your key arrives by email from Polar, our checkout partner, right after purchase - it starts with ATLAS-. Open Atlas, paste the key into the activation screen and press Enter. Capitalisation doesn't matter, and pressing activate twice won't use up an extra device slot. If the email hasn't arrived within a few minutes, check the spam folder, then write to support@theodorehq.com and we will sort it out.

No problem. Your key was emailed from Polar, our checkout partner, when you bought Atlas - search your inbox for "Polar" or "Atlas". If Atlas is already activated on a Mac, Settings under About shows the email address the license is registered to, which helps track the right inbox down. Can't find it anywhere? Email support@theodorehq.com from the address you purchased with and we will send your key again.

One license covers three Macs, so often you can simply activate on the new machine. If Atlas says your key has reached its activation limit, free a slot first: on a Mac that no longer needs Atlas, open Settings, go to About and choose Deactivate This Mac - the slot frees immediately, and your groups and people stay saved there. Then enter the same key on the new Mac. Old Mac already wiped, sold or gone? Email support@theodorehq.com and we will release the slot for you.

Day to day, yes. The map, clocks, groups and time suggestions all run entirely on your Mac. Atlas verifies your license quietly in the background and is happy offline for a week at a time; normal internet use keeps that ticking over without you ever noticing. You will only need a connection to look up new cities, activate a license, or download updates.

Every purchase comes with a 30-day no-questions refund. Email support@theodorehq.com from the address you bought with and the refund is processed within five working days. UK buyers keep all their statutory consumer rights on top of that, including the remedies for faulty digital content. Not sure Atlas fits before buying? Ask first - we would genuinely rather help you decide than process a refund.

The quickest fix is to remove that person and add them again by searching their city - Atlas re-checks the time zone with Apple Maps as you add them, and the latest versions refuse to guess when a place is ambiguous. If a pin shows a dash instead of a time, Atlas is saying it cannot work out that place's zone on your Mac, and re-adding is the cure there too. Daylight saving is handled automatically, so clock changes need no action. Still looks off? Email support@theodorehq.com with the city name.

macOS is blocking calendar access, usually because the permission was declined at some point. Click the Open Settings button on the message (or go to System Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Calendars) and switch Atlas on. When you come back, Atlas notices the change and retries the save on its own. Prefer not to grant calendar access at all? Choose Google, Outlook, Yahoo or the calendar-file option in Settings instead - those routes need no permission.

Two common causes. First, when the event opens as a pre-filled page in your browser, it still needs its Save button clicked - Atlas fills everything in, but Google makes the final save. Second, with several Google accounts signed in, the page may have opened in the wrong one: in Settings, under Calendar, pin the group's Google calendar and add the account email, and Atlas will open the right account every time after that. Freshly saved events can also take a few seconds to sync across devices.

Atlas keys always start with ATLAS-. Seeing this message usually means a key for one of our other apps, such as Solace or Charm, was pasted by mistake - each app has its own key, even though they share a checkout. Check your purchase email for the key beginning ATLAS- and paste that one instead. If you only ever bought Atlas and still see this, email support@theodorehq.com and we will check the order for you.

First check the system side: open System Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Location Services - make sure Location Services is on and Atlas is allowed. Back in Atlas, flick the Auto-detect Location toggle in Settings to try again. No luck, or you would rather not share location at all? Type your city into the Set Your City field in the You section of Settings - a manual pin works identically, and either way the lookup only ever talks to Apple Maps.

City search runs on Apple's place lookup, so the usual culprit is the internet connection - Atlas shows "Couldn't reach search" when it can't get through. Once you are back online, try again. If a small town won't come up, search the nearest larger city (the time zone will be the same) or add the country name to the search. Atlas deliberately declines to add a place when it can't confirm the real time zone, so it never shows you a wrong clock.

Atlas keeps running when its window closes - that is by design, so your people stay one click away. Bring it back by clicking the constellation icon in the menu bar and choosing Open Atlas, or click the Atlas icon in the Dock. You can also record a global shortcut in Settings, under Behaviour, to summon Atlas from inside any app. To quit completely, right-click the menu bar icon and choose Quit Atlas.

Email support@theodorehq.com. A real person, not a bot, reads every message and usually replies within a day. Not sure whether Atlas suits your team? Email us before buying and we will gladly help. You can also report bugs, request features, and vote on ideas right here on the feedback board.

Open Settings, go to the About tab, and look for the Support section. From there you can Report a Bug, Request a Feature, Leave a Testimonial, Review the Roadmap or browse the FAQ, each opening the matching page in your browser. Reporting a bug or requesting a feature lets you track its progress and follow the roadmap, so you can see what is coming next. You can also reach these directly at support.theodorehq.com/atlas. For anything private, email support@theodorehq.com.

No accounts, no servers, no telemetry. Your team list, settings and calendar stay on your Mac. Only three small things ever leave it: a one-time location lookup with Apple Maps to find your time zone, a licence check when you activate, and update checks. Nothing about your schedule or your people is ever sent anywhere.

At most three, all optional. Location places your own pin and sets your time zone; the coordinates go only to Apple Maps for the city lookup. Calendars lets Atlas hide times you are busy and add the meetings you approve; events are read locally and never uploaded. Automation lets Atlas open Apple Calendar on the right day after saving, so your new event is the one in front of you. Decline any of them and the rest of Atlas keeps working normally.

Everything lives on your Mac: your groups and people in a small file inside Atlas's app-data folder, your preferences alongside it, and your license safely in the macOS Keychain. Because it is ordinary local data, Time Machine and other Mac backups include it automatically - restore your Mac and Atlas comes back with your groups intact. There is no cloud copy, because nothing ever leaves the machine.

Echo is a menu-bar app that remembers every song, podcast and video you play, across your apps and your browser, in one tidy history. Press the global shortcut from anywhere and a fast, keyboard-first overlay appears. Choose anything and it resumes at the exact spot you left off, and videos can come back in a floating picture-in-picture player that hovers over your work.

Native apps that publish to macOS Now Playing, including Spotify, Apple Music and Apple Podcasts, work out of the box. Add the free companion browser extension and Echo also remembers anything you play in your browser: YouTube, Spotify Web, SoundCloud, podcasts, and any tab with audio or video.

You only need the extension for media you play in your browser; native apps like Spotify, Apple Music and Apple Podcasts work without it. To set it up, open Echo's Settings, go to General, and click "Get Extension" next to the Browser row. It's free: the Chrome listing works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Dia, Vivaldi and Opera, Firefox has its own listing, and Safari isn't supported yet. There's nothing to pair or configure. While the Echo app is running, the extension connects on its own, its toolbar icon shows a green dot, and the same Settings row switches to "Connected".

Echo works out of the box. macOS will ask once to let Echo control Spotify and Apple Music, which powers precise resume for those apps. Two permissions are optional and only for specific features: Accessibility lets Echo control Apple Podcasts and resume things in the background more reliably, and Screen Recording is used solely by "Hide Spotify & Music On Resume" to cover a tiny corner of the screen behind the hidden player window. Echo never records your screen. After granting either one, quit and reopen Echo.

Press Cmd-Shift-E from anywhere on your Mac (or click the three-bar icon in the menu bar) and Echo's overlay appears: what's playing now pinned at the top, then everything else, newest first. Just start typing to filter, use the arrow keys to move, and press Return to resume quietly in the background. Cmd-Return resumes and brings the app or tab to the front, and Esc closes the overlay. You can change any of these keys in Settings, under Shortcuts.

Yes. Echo turns on Launch At Login the first time it runs, because it can only remember what you play while it's running: if it didn't come back after a restart, your history would quietly stop. If you'd rather start it yourself, switch off Launch At Login in Settings, under General, and Echo will respect that choice permanently. It lives in the menu bar only, so it never adds a window or a Dock icon to your day.

Echo checks for updates automatically in the background about once an hour, and shortly after it launches, so you'll be offered new versions as they ship. To check right now, click the Echo icon in the menu bar and choose "Check for Updates...". Every update is included with your licence at no extra cost, and updates are signed and verified before they install.

Yes. While something plays, Echo quietly notes your position every few seconds, and it always keeps the furthest point you reached, so scrubbing back or an accidental restart never loses your place. Resume then returns you to that exact spot: YouTube videos reopen at the right second, Spotify and Apple Music jump to the exact track and position, and podcasts pick up mid-episode. If you finish something and later start it again from the top, Echo notices and lets it begin fresh.

Yes, Spotify is one of Echo's best-supported apps. With the desktop app, Echo remembers every track and resumes the exact song at the exact position, quietly in the background, without the Spotify window jumping in front of you. Spotify in a browser tab is remembered too, as one tidy entry that always shows your latest track. And if you pick a Spotify web item while the desktop app is installed, Echo is smart enough to hand playback to the app instead of opening a tab.

That's intentional. Re-picking a three-minute song almost always means "play this song", not "continue it from 1:47", so ordinary music starts from the top. Long-form listening is different: podcasts, videos, and any music longer than 20 minutes (DJ sets, mixes, ambient tracks, audiobooks) resume exactly where you left off, because that's the thing you most want to continue. So the short stuff behaves like a jukebox and the long stuff behaves like a bookmark, automatically.

With the browser extension installed, every YouTube video you watch for more than a few seconds joins your history, keyed to the video itself, so the same video opened from different links or tabs stays one entry. Press Return on it later and it comes back at the exact second, playing in Echo's own floating player, no tab required. Cmd-Return reopens the real YouTube tab instead. Videos that block embedding still work: Echo hands them to your browser's built-in floating player automatically.

Resume a video and it can float in a small window that stays on top while you work. Hover over the picture and it fades to a ghost so you can see and click whatever is behind it, without moving the window. A slim control bar gives you a scrubber, 10-second skips, play and pause, playback speed (1x, 1.5x and 2x), open-in-browser, and close. Choose which screen corner it lives in, and how far from the edge, in Settings under Playback. Ctrl-Option-P toggles it from anywhere.

Yes. Any browser video can play sound-only in the background, with no window at all, which is perfect for talks, podcasts on YouTube and music videos. Echo remembers how you last enjoyed each video, watching or just listening, and a plain Return repeats that choice. Option-Return flips it for a single play, and the watch toggle on the now-playing card (or Ctrl-Option-P) switches between watching and listening live, without interrupting playback. The default for first-time videos is in Settings, under Playback.

That's Echo's single-playback rule: when you start something new, whatever was already playing pauses, so two things never talk over each other. It works across everything, desktop apps and browser tabs alike, and it deliberately never pauses a live call: meeting sites like Google Meet, Zoom, Teams and Slack are always left alone. Spotify on desktop and Spotify in a tab count as one player, so they won't fight each other. Prefer to manage audio yourself? Turn it off in Settings, under Playback.

Moments are bookmarked spots inside whatever you're listening to or watching. Hear something worth coming back to? Press Ctrl-Option-M from anywhere and Echo saves the spot, wound back ten seconds so you get the run-up rather than the instant you pressed the key. A small confirmation appears on screen. Your Moments live in their own tab in the overlay (Cmd-6), each one jumps straight to its second, and you can add a note to remember why you saved it.

The Shelf is your "continue watching" list for the whole Mac: podcasts and videos you've genuinely started but haven't finished. Echo works this out from how far through you are, so nothing needs marking by hand. Things you're at least 80% through appear in their own "almost done" group, ideal for a quick finish, and anything untouched for three weeks quietly drops off so the Shelf never becomes a guilt pile. Find it in the overlay's scope bar, or press Cmd-5.

Two ways. Pin an item (Cmd-P) to float it to the top of your history, or Save it (Cmd-S) to add it to your Saved queue of things to start later (Cmd-7 to view). Both are permanently kept: even if you set Keep History to the last 7 days or the last 50 items in Settings, pinned and saved items are never pruned. Everything else ages out according to your Keep History choice, which defaults to keeping everything.

Yes. Select an item in the overlay, press Cmd-K to open its actions, and choose Send to Phone. Echo shows a QR code, generated entirely on your Mac, that links to the item anchored at your exact playback position. Point your phone's camera at it and the video or track opens right where you left off on the Mac. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; it's simply a link with your spot built in.

Yes, every shortcut in Echo is rebindable, from the global summon key (Cmd-Shift-E by default) down to the individual overlay keys for tabs, actions and navigation. Open Settings, choose Shortcuts, click a shortcut and press your new combination. Echo checks for clashes as you record and tells you if a key is already taken. Global shortcuts and letter keys need a modifier (Cmd, Option, Ctrl or Shift) so they can't collide with typing in the search box, and Reset All puts everything back to the defaults.

Echo is $9.99, a one-time purchase, with no subscription and no account. One licence covers up to three Macs and every future update is included. There is no time-limited trial; instead there is a 14-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it, try it properly, and email support@theodorehq.com for a full refund if it is not for you. It needs macOS 13 or later.

Your key was shown right after checkout and emailed to you with your purchase receipt, so a quick search of your inbox for "Polar" or "Echo" usually finds it. If it's nowhere to be found, email support@theodorehq.com from the address you bought with and we'll look it up and get you back in, usually within a day. There's also a shortcut inside the app: Settings, Licence, "Lost Your Key?" opens that email for you.

Your licence covers up to three Macs, so often you can simply install Echo on the new machine and enter your key. If all three slots are used, free one first: on a Mac you no longer need, open Settings, go to Licence, and click Deactivate This Mac, then confirm. That releases the slot immediately. On the new Mac, download Echo from theodorehq.com/echo, enter your key, and you're back up and running with your settings fresh.

Yes. Echo itself is fully local, so capturing and resuming work with no connection at all. The only thing that needs the internet occasionally is your licence: Echo confirms it quietly in the background, and a Mac can stay offline for up to 7 days between checks. If you've been away longer than that, Echo asks you to connect once so it can verify the licence, then carries on as normal. Nothing about your listening history is involved in that check.

Three quick checks usually solve this. First, make sure the extension is installed and the Echo app is open: in Echo's Settings under General, the Browser row should say "Connected", and the extension's toolbar icon shows a green dot. Second, check the site: the extension watches the major media sites, including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Twitch, Deezer and Amazon Music. Third, remember Echo only notes things after about 10 seconds of actual, audible playback, so muted clips and quick previews are skipped on purpose.

That message means the extension can't reach the Echo app right now. Open Echo (check for the three-bar icon in the menu bar) and the extension reconnects automatically within a few seconds, no pairing needed. If Echo is open but still not detected, make sure your licence is activated, since Echo only starts its browser connection once it's unlocked, and try quitting and reopening your browser once so it picks up the fresh connection. Keeping your browser up to date also helps: the most reliable connection method needs Chrome 144 or newer.

Echo is choosy on purpose, so your history stays meaningful. Things are only noted after about 10 seconds of continuous, audible play (adjustable in Settings, General, "Only Note After"), so skipped tracks and muted autoplay clips never appear. Messaging, mail, meetings and document sites (WhatsApp, Slack, Google Meet, Google Docs and friends) are always ignored, as are screen recorders. Also check that Pause Echo isn't switched on, and that the app or site isn't in your Never Record lists under Settings, Privacy & Permissions.

Echo saves your position every few seconds while something plays, and it always keeps the furthest point you genuinely reached, so a stray scrub backwards or an accidental restart can't erase your progress. If a resume seems off, play the item for a few seconds so a fresh position is written, then it will be exact from there. Two behaviours are deliberate: finishing something and starting it again from the top resets it so you can rewatch, and ordinary songs restart from the beginning by design, while podcasts, videos and long music continue mid-way.

Browsers only let a brand-new or long-idle tab start making sound while it's front and centre, a rule designed to stop pages autoplaying behind your back. So when a resume needs a fresh tab, Echo opens it in front just long enough to get it playing, then returns you to the tab and app you were in while the audio continues in the background. Granting Echo the Accessibility permission (Settings, Privacy & Permissions) makes these quiet resumes succeed more often. Videos resumed with plain Return normally use Echo's own player instead, which avoids tabs entirely.

Yes. Echo already tucks the player away moments after a quiet resume, but for complete invisibility turn on "Hide Spotify & Music On Resume" in Settings, under Playback. It needs two macOS permissions: Accessibility, to move the player's window out of sight, and Screen Recording, which is used only to copy the small strip of screen behind the parked window so it's perfectly covered. Nothing is ever recorded or sent anywhere. After granting both, quit and reopen Echo and resumes become fully seamless.

Apple Podcasts is the one app that offers no direct way for other apps to control it, so Echo presses its Play control for you through the Accessibility permission. Grant it in Echo's Settings, under Privacy & Permissions (or when macOS asks), then quit and reopen Echo. From then on, picking an episode resumes Podcasts quietly in the background, and Echo will even launch the app for you if it's closed. Without the permission, Echo still tries its best, but resume is much more reliable with it granted.

When a keyboard combination is already claimed by another app or by macOS itself, the system gives it to whoever registered first, so Echo's press never arrives. The fix is quick: open Settings, go to Shortcuts, click the shortcut and record a new combination. Echo validates it as you type and warns about clashes with its own keys. Combinations with two modifiers (like Cmd-Shift or Ctrl-Option) are rarely taken. If the overlay opens but a key inside it does nothing, check the same panel, since every overlay key is rebindable too.

Email support@theodorehq.com. A real person, not a bot, reads every message and usually replies within a day. Whether it is a question, a bug report, or an idea for Echo, we would love to hear from you. You can also report bugs, request features, and vote on ideas right here on the feedback board.

Completely. Everything Echo records stays on your Mac: there is no account, no cloud and no analytics. The browser extension only reads the title, artwork and playback position of tabs that are playing media, and passes them straight to the Echo app on your own Mac over a loopback connection (127.0.0.1) that never touches the internet. It never reads your browsing history or page content, and nothing is ever sent to us.

Everything you play stays on your Mac: history, artwork, Moments and listening sessions live in local files under your user library, and your licence key sits in the macOS Keychain. Echo has no analytics, no telemetry and no account. The only network traffic is: an occasional licence check with our payment provider (your key and your Mac's name, never your history), the hourly check for app updates, and fetching cover images over secure connections. Playing something naturally streams from that service, exactly as if you'd pressed play yourself.

Absolutely, you're in full control. In Settings, under Privacy & Permissions, add any app or website to the Never Record lists and Echo will ignore it completely. Sensitive places are already excluded for you: messaging, mail, meetings and document sites never enter your history. You can also pause all tracking with one switch (Settings, General, Pause Echo), remove any single item or a whole app's items from the overlay, clear everything, or cap how long history is kept. Deleting an item also removes its cached artwork from disk.

Not unless you ask it to. Diagnostic Logging is off by default. If you're troubleshooting something with us, you can turn it on in Settings, under Privacy & Permissions, and Echo keeps a local log you can export and attach to a support email yourself. Nothing is ever sent automatically, the file lives only on your Mac, and switching the toggle off deletes it immediately so nothing lingers.