 If you want to control your bandwidth usage on your Mac, maybe you are tethering to a mobile device and don't want to have those Dropbox Red downloads kicking in, or maybe you are live streaming. Well, there is an app for that and I'm gonna tell you about it in this video. Hello and welcome to Take One Tech. My name's Alec and in this video I'm gonna give you a little run through of a small menu bar app called Trip Mode. Now this is something that I did touch on in another video I did, which was all about five menu bar apps for live streamers. So I'll leave a link to that in the description below but I didn't actually go through a sort of full tutorial on exactly how to use it. So that is the purpose of this video. The Trip Mode basically controls what applications that are running on your Mac have access to the network. It is as simple as that. And there are lots of different use cases for this. As I say, I make all of these videos in e-cam live and so for this and live streaming I would have a Trip Mode limit which applications can access the network because I don't want, as I said in the intro something like a Dropbox sync kicking in just when I need all of the bandwidth for something else. And so that's what it allows you to do. I also used to use it quite heavily when I used to travel. I haven't been traveling for about a year funnily enough but when I did it was great to be able to control what was accessing my network when I was tethering to my mobile device whether I was in a hotel, airport lounge or wherever it happened to be. So it's great for that as well. So let me go over to my screen sharing and I'll just show you quickly the website for the application. Although there is a better way to buy it actually but I'll show you the website first. They even recommend this way on their website funnily enough. But yeah, this is the website for Trip Mode and I'll leave a link to this in the description as always of course. You can download a free trial of it here but I'll come back to that later and it tells you all about it in here. Now the way that I would recommend perhaps getting this is rather than from the website, I think on the website it is 799 although there are three different levels with different features but you can get the full featured version by signing up to something called Setapp. Now this was something I mentioned in that previous video as well but Setapp you can get a free trial of that as well so you would be able to try this application and more. Just head over to takeonetech.io slash setapp and what Setapp is is it is an application that gives you access to over 200 other applications. So you can have this on your computer and you can browse through the list of all the other applications available and you sign up to Setapp for 999 a month and then you get access to all of these including all future updates as well. So it's a great way to get lots of different software packages for a small monthly fee and if you use the link that I've given you there as well as the free trial if you go on to subscribe to Setapp after the free trial you'll also get a free month there as well and just for disclosure that's the way the affiliate link works is you would get a free month and I would also get a free month added onto my subscription so just to be perfectly clear about that but Setapp is something that I use and I can highly recommend it's a great way as I say to get access to all of these other applications. So what exactly is Trip Mode? Now we've gone on that diversion what is Trip Mode and how do we use it? Well let me just get this browser window out of the way as I say it is a menu bar app so it just sits up here in the top of the menu bar and at the moment I've got it switched off but if I just click on it for a moment you'll see that the interface in the menu bar comes up like this. Now there is a little cog wheel so before I get into exactly how it works in fact no, let me show you how it works first of all shall I? So as you can see at the moment it is switched off we've got the little off switch and all of these different applications that I've left running on my Mac purposefully to show you all of these things that are currently trying to access the network or who have accessed the network. So lots of different things on there I've got Microsoft Teams running Facebook Messenger, iCloud sync my stocks app, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel Descript, lots and lots of different things and some of them you may not really think that they're actually making calls over the network I mean possibly you might not have thought that Excel would be all PowerPoints but they all do make these little calls to the internet periodically. So yes quite a lot of apps I've got open here that's a bit of a no-no really when I'm recording but I left it over here to prove a point because I've got this set up as my little recording profile I'll get into profiles a little bit later but if I just simply toggle this switch on what you can see is all of those other apps have disappeared and these are the only ones that at the moment have access. So I've got this set up as my recording section but maybe I don't actually want mail to have access so I can come in here and see that it is switched on and I can just toggle it off so now it won't be trying to fetch any mail while I am actually recording and the only things that I've got it using at the moment is Google Chrome and e-cam live and as you can see every time an application wants to try to call the network it will pop up in this list and you can see that it's grayed out so it can't access it. So that is basically how you just toggle it on and off but let me go into the settings because there are a few other things to run through here. So if I open the settings which by the way and you can also see that the icon before I move on, you can see that the little train icon is sort of blinking red so every time anything does make a call to the network you'll notice that it turns red but we'll see that in the settings. Now the way to get to the settings is you come over to these little three dots in the top corner of the window. You click on that and then you go to the settings tab and this will open up the trip mode preferences like we've got here. Now there are basically three different sections. There is general profile and scheduler. So first of all in the general tab you would maybe want to have this toggle to open at login that's up to you. So that would just load it up automatically when you open your computer so that you know it'll always be there in the menu bar. Now we've got this one which is internet access behavior for newly detected apps. So this is basically what's gonna happen if a new app comes up and wants to access the internet. So at the moment I've got that set to always allow and that will bear in mind only actually take effect if you have got a trip mode switch on. So trip mode switched on and I don't mean open but actually physically active. So here you can see that it is active. So what you may want to do is given that there are some things in this list that you might not have open at the time you might want to change that to always block. So if you've got trip mode active what you wouldn't want to do is an app open up that you didn't really realize what's gonna be making calls to the internet and then suddenly you're tethered to your 5G signal from your mobile or something like that and then it starts downloading a load of data. So probably always block is a better suggestion there. Then it says when a disabled app tries to access the network so you've got a little thing there flash icon in the menu bar. So here you can see this little icon this is where I mentioned about it flashing. So that is when specifically a disabled app is trying to access the network. You can also turn on notifications. Personally I don't have any of these on because all I want to do is just sort of set it and forget it and not have little bings and bongs coming through every time an app tries to access the network but if you did want to be alerted you could click that there. You could also even have it say the application name so it would actually announce which application was being naughty and trying to hog your bandwidth. And then you can also change the amount of time that you want the notification to show for. Again, I don't have that on because the last thing I want is actually audible sounds or even notifications coming on the screen while I'm trying to record or live stream or anything like that. And then you can also have this start the monthly count on day one. So one of the options in the actual view that you have in trip mode, sorry I've clicked on the wrong one. You can show it shows the bandwidth that's been used by each application and you can also show how much has been used in this session or you can also say how much has been used today, this week or this month. So you can just choose the day of the month that it is starting on. So as you can see, not much in those settings and the ones I would recommend would be potentially open trip mode at login. That's up to you. I actually don't have things opening at login. I have a separate script that I run to open specific applications depending on what I'm doing on my computer at that time. And then this one always blocked new applications. I would probably recommend to have that. These ones, I'm not so fussed about to be honest. Next section is the profile section. Now this is quite useful if you are using trip mode for multiple different things. So I have my default profile. You can also have a profile set up for different network settings or different networks. So you could have one set up specifically when you are tethered to your phone and it would automatically detect that that is the network you are attached to and whenever you attach to that network, it automatically switches on. And that is where you would have this switched here. So you can have it switch profiles manually, not switching profiles or automatically. So if you have it set to automatically every time you switch to a specific network, like as I say, a mobile hotspot, then it would automatically switch on. I actually don't want it to do that because I use multiple separate profiles that I use on multiple different networks. So personally, I don't have that one set. I just prefer to switch it manually. You will have automatically created profiles for different networks. So you can see that they have appeared here. So that one there, the name of my cat is the name of my network. That's my Wi-Fi network. But then also you've got the user created profile. So I have a profile created for recording. I have one for streaming. I have one for tethering and I have one for Zoom calls. So all of those have got different settings and different apps that I allow access. So if I'm live streaming, then I prefer to just basically cut out all unnecessary traffic whatsoever. Whereas if I'm recording, sometimes when I do these videos, then I do do demos where maybe I access like the app store or something like that. And so for that, I've obviously got different permissions for different apps. Then I have another one for tethering, which is specifically when I'm just on a mobile and I don't want to have any data use whatsoever. Both technically it's more like roaming as well because sometimes internationally, the last thing you want to do is have it actually starting to download data over the internet using roaming charges. And then finally, I have one for Zoom, which is specifically when I'm on my Zoom calls just to give me a bit of a better connection. But again, that is a different use case. So I have different apps that are allowed. Now you can have it in here monitor data usage and you can block certain applications after they have downloaded a certain amount. I personally don't do this because I find I can manage it all with the different profiles, but you could have something if it downloaded too much data then it would automatically switch off. That would be something that you might want to consider if you had got a particular limit on your data plan and you didn't want to ever exceed that then you could have it so that it was automatically switching on when you were tethering to your data, to your mobile and then also automatically switching off if it ever came close to your data limit or something like that. But again, I don't particularly use that. I just manage my usage in other ways. So the next part of this is applications. So for each individual section, each individual profile, I forgot the word there, you can also just click and add in extra applications that you want so that they will appear in the list and you can deactivate them or activate them there. And oh, and by the way, simply adding a profile is if I create a new profile like this and then click create, then that profile will just appear down here. So that is the profiles section. Now you can also have a scheduled application. Let me just revert that because I don't need that extra one. If I come into this scheduler, then you can also add a scheduled event. So you could have it so that this turns on automatically at a specific time and you can come in here and just change this and tell it what to do. So either you're going to force it to be on or you might want to force it to be off and the time and so on. This is another thing that I don't particularly use myself because I'm quite flexible with my time and so I don't have a particular schedule where I want these things to come on and off. But that is somewhere where you can activate those in any case. So just coming back out of the preferences for a moment and back into trip mode, those profiles that we set up there, by the way, if I just switch this off, now we're back to everything has access again. Those profiles I've got just appear here. So they are the default profile, recording, streaming, zoom and tethering. So I can just flick between whichever one I want to use in there. So I could change this to my streaming profile. One second, there we go. And then just toggle that one on. And that would then be active and even fewer applications then have access to the network. So that is a bit of a rundown of how I use trip mode and hopefully how you can use it to limit your bandwidth usage by your applications. I hope that that has been useful. If it has been useful, then don't forget to go and like and subscribe to the channel. He says, as his stream deck suddenly stops working. I'm not quite sure why. I tell you why that is. So here we go. This is a good example. Let me just come back because what happened there is I changed to a profile that doesn't normally allow my stream deck to work. So what I need to do is toggle this off and then what we should find is. So there is another tip. If you are using stream deck, make sure you have that one active as an allowed application. Otherwise, it will cut off the network traffic from your stream deck as well because it isn't just over the internet. It also would cut it off into your computer as well. So another top tip that I've just inadvertently stumbled upon through that little demonstration. So if you have found that useful, don't forget to go and like and subscribe. And in the meantime, until the next video, I hope you all have a wonderful day and check out some of these other videos coming up next.