Download

Privacy

What happens to your data

Nothing leaves your Mac unless you ask a tool to send it.

This website

This website is hosted by Cloudflare. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device.

I only count how often the app is downloaded, per day, version and country. Cloudflare works out the country from the request, and your IP address is not stored. No script runs in your browser for this. Page views and where you came from are not counted.

The app

teespoons has no analytics and sends no telemetry. There is no account and no licence check. This version doesn’t check for updates. When one does, it will read a small version file from tee-spoons.com, and this page will say so first.

Two tools can go online, and only when you want them to.

  • Translate uses the translator built into macOS by default, on your Mac (macOS 26; older versions have none teespoons can use). If you paste your own DeepL key into Settings, the text you select goes to DeepL over HTTPS (api.deepl.com or api-free.deepl.com). Nothing else is sent, no ID and no other text. The key is kept in your login Keychain and never shows up in the log. Without a key, Translate makes no requests at all.
  • Dictation downloads a speech model from huggingface.co over HTTPS the first time you use it, between 78 MB and 1.5 GB depending on the model you pick. Recording and recognition happen on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded. After that it doesn’t need the internet.

Lookup makes no requests itself. It passes a search address to your default browser, and the browser sends the words you selected to the site you picked. That’s Google at first, and you can add any site. Neither the words nor the address go into the log.

Connectivity switches Wi-Fi and your VPNs right on your Mac. No server of mine is involved. Display Brightness talks to your monitors directly over the cable.

Clipboard

Clipboard remembers what you copy. Entries are kept for 30 days by default, encrypted on your Mac in ~/Library/Application Support/TeeSpoons/clipboard.enc. The key is generated randomly on your Mac and kept in your login Keychain. Without it the file can’t be read. If the Keychain won’t hand over the key, Clipboard saves nothing rather than saving it unencrypted.

Copies from a password manager are saved encrypted too, but hidden. You only see dots and the app’s name, search doesn’t find them, and the text only appears when you click Show in the clipboard picker, never in Settings. You can also set them not to be kept at all. Private keys, API tokens and card numbers with a valid checksum are never saved. You can pause recording or delete entries at any time, also with a shortcut. The log never contains clipboard text.

Timelapse

Timelapse looks at your screen twice a second, but only while it’s switched on. When something has changed, it keeps a frame. Each frame is encrypted as it’s saved, with its own key in your login Keychain, into ~/Library/Application Support/TeeSpoons/timelapse or a folder you pick in Settings. The text reader in the time machine uses macOS’s text recognition on your Mac and only keeps the words in memory while the window is open. Films you export are ordinary .mp4 files in ~/Movies/teespoons. None of it leaves your Mac. One shortcut deletes the last five minutes.

What is stored where

Everything teespoons saves for itself is in ~/Library/Application Support/TeeSpoons/, Timelapse too unless you picked another folder.

  • Your shortcuts in a plain text file, keymap.toml. Next to it the Clipboard settings in clipboard.toml and your Lookup sites in lookup.toml.
  • The log, teespoons.log. It records which shortcut fired and whether it worked. It never contains clipboard text, selected text, translations, transcripts or keys. It’s capped at 2 MB plus one older copy, and only leaves your Mac if you send it to me.
  • Cheat sheets in cheatsheets/, copies of the images and PDFs you add yourself.
  • Speech models in models/whisper/, once you’ve used dictation.
  • The teespoons window is a web view, so macOS keeps its window settings the way it does for a browser, under ~/Library/WebKit/de.teespoons.app/ with a cache in ~/Library/Caches/de.teespoons.app/.

macOS permissions

Accessibility lets a shortcut move a window, read the text you selected and type for you. teespoons only uses it while a shortcut runs, only on the window in front or your selected text, and sends none of it anywhere.

Screen Recording is only used by the Window Switcher, for its previews, and by Timelapse. Everything else works without it.

Microphone is only for dictation. Automation lets MediaControls talk to Spotify and FinderArchive ask Finder what you selected. No other commands are sent, and only the track name or the file paths come back.

Questions and security problems

Write to beta@tee-spoons.com. Security problems go to security@tee-spoons.com, which is also in /.well-known/security.txt.

As of version 1.5.6-beta.1, last updated October 2026. Changes will be noted here with a date.