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enter image description here

This item just appeared after a Microsoft update. "Distant Future Corp" has a couple of apps on the app store and only a few staff. They appear to deal with sharing of things like link collections, but it’s hard to find out much about them or their CEO(?) Steve Gehrman (as a Flutter developer he has a GitHub account and allied company Cocoatech developed Path Finder, which I brew installed and then uninstalled—awhile before this MS addition—as it failed to do what I needed).

It seems impossible from an hour or more searching to find out why Microsoft has added this to my startup items, or what that company has to do with Microsoft. For now I’ve turned it off. Anyone know any more?

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    Why use brew to install gui apps?
    – benwiggy
    Commented Apr 26 at 14:00
  • Homebrew is pretty widespread practice for installing anything on OS X - I find it keeps things clean, I can easily get a list of installs, and uninstall is easy. I’ve still had to install a couple of apps from the App Store, though.
    – Dave Everitt
    Commented Apr 27 at 11:36

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Distant Future Corp is the owner of Cocoatech who are the developers/creators of Path Finder. See this Privacy Policy. (Found with a simple web search.)

A complete uninstall of Path Finder would have removed the background and privileged helper software including that with the Distant Future Corp developer certificate.

This page Path Finder FAQ includes assistance in uninstalling Path Finder.

For futures uninstalls, I suggest you use an app like AppCleaner which is pretty accurate at removing all the detritus left compared with just delete an app or brew uninstall it.

This has nothing to do with Microsoft.

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  • Thanks, already did digging re Cocoatech etc. (hence links in my question). I usually use AppCleaner but did brew uninstall (because of how I installed it) which left residue… now tidied up and no longer a login item. However the message in the image popped up during a Microsoft update long after that uninstall. I have to use Microsoft company portal to access the uni system where I work, so will check that still works too. I was interested in finding out why it would be triggered during an MS update when nothing else was going on.
    – Dave Everitt
    Commented Apr 27 at 11:58
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    @DaveEveritt Recent versions of macOS ping Notifications about LaunchAgents randomly all the time. I keep getting one about the same thing over and over. I wouldn't assume there was correlation with the MS update.
    – benwiggy
    Commented Apr 27 at 13:47

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