reduce unwanted alerts in DetectX Swift

If you’re a regular user of DetectX Swift (DTXS), you’ll be familiar with the Folder Observer function. Although DetectX has always been and will remain an on-demand search tool in principle (i.e., it doesn’t do anything unless you launch it), the Folder Observer adds the capability to alert you and optionally launch DTXS if any items are added or removed from your Launch folders.

This is a useful feature which removes the need, for example, to set Folder Actions or other scripting solutions on the folders which are most likely to be written to in the event of an adware or malware attack. However, as some users (and even myself!) have noticed, the Folder Observer can, at times, be a little irritating.

For example, here at sqwarq I have Little Snitch installed, which puts daemons and agents in both of the local domain Launch folders. The annoyance occurs whenever Little Snitch requires an update. When that happens, the daemon and agents will get written to, and DTXS will dutifully throw me an alert:

Great, except that I don’t really want alerts for software I already trust. I only really want to know about stuff that I don’t know is already in those folders. Of course, I can uncheck the preference for the Folder Observer entirely to stop all alerts, but that then deprives me of the security of being warned of things that I do want to be informed about.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution that will allow you to tame DTXS and customise the alerts to your personal needs.

1. Go to DetectX Swift > Preferences and click the ‘Observer’ tab.
2. Click the ‘Ignore Keywords’ checkbox (you need to be a registered or licensed user).
3. Click the ‘Edit’ button, and add the launch label of each item you want to ignore in a comma-separated list.
4. Click the ‘OK’ button to finish.

You can get the launch label either by reading it from each of the property lists that you want to ignore, or directly from DetectX Swift’s Profiler. The linked video shows one way you can do that.

Enjoy! 🙂

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