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Setting up the Live Scanner

The Live Scanner is a small program for Mac and Windows that sits beside your auction stream. Downloading it takes a minute – the one hurdle comes afterwards, and it looks worse than it is.

One thing up front: the scanner’s window is in German only. The app itself speaks English, the scanner does not yet – the buttons and messages in this small program are German. Everything it shows you – names, numbers, prices – comes from your own instance and is unaffected.

What you need first

Downloading and installing

1

Download it

The current version is with the project’s releases – one package for Mac, one for Windows.

Download the latest version

2

Unpack it and put it away

On the Mac, unpack the archive and drag the app into Applications. On Windows, unpack it and start it.

3

Sign in

On first start the scanner asks for the address of your Nupplo instance, a username and a password. What gets stored afterwards is only a token – not the password itself. It lands in ~/.brickfolio-livescan.json, in your home folder and not in the app.

The warning on first start

This is where most people give up, and that is a shame – because the message is to be expected and says nothing about the program.

“Apple could not verify that Brickfolio Live Scanner is free of malware.” That does not mean something was found, but that nobody looked: the app is not notarised with Apple, and that requires a developer account at 99 € a year. It is a price tag, not a finding.

1

Not into the bin

The dialog offers Move to Trash and Done. Click Done – the attempt has to have happened once, or the next step will not be there.

2

Allow it in the settings

System Settings → Privacy & Security, then scroll all the way down. There is now a line with Open Anyway.

If you would rather type, here it is in one go in Terminal:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Brickfolio Live-Scanner.app"
3

Allow screen recording

macOS asks once, and the scanner needs it: it does, after all, capture a section of your screen. Without this permission you get a black image instead of the section – the setting is under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording.

Right-click → Open does not help here. That was the usual trick up to macOS 14; since macOS 15 Apple has removed it for this particular dialog. Guides on the web that still recommend it are out of date.

On Windows it is SmartScreen rather than Gatekeeper, for the same reason: no certificate. Once through More info and then Run anyway.

And afterwards?

Only once

The block hangs on the download, not on the app: the browser attaches a quarantine mark to every file it fetches. When the scanner picks up a new version itself, from 1.7.0 onwards, that mark never appears – and you are never asked again. Anyone who builds the app from source never sees the warning at all.

And what is it installing there?

Only what comes from the same house. Before swapping anything, the scanner compares the signature of the downloaded package with its own; if it differs or is missing, everything stays as it was.

Your sign-in survives

The address and the token live in your home folder, not in the app. So laying a new version over the old one does not mean signing in again.

Live Scanner on GitHub Install Nupplo