Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2018-01-26

Another update week! macOS 10.13.3 and iOS 11.2.5 dropped along with the usual other updates. Security Updates for Sierra and El Capitan bring Meltdown fixes and (maybe) APFS support for Sierra.

The end of one beta cycle is the begin of the next. macOS 10.13.4 and iOS 11.3 started in beta. Apple seems so proud of this update that they put up an iOS 11.3 preview. Also an announcement that the macOS Server application will be severely reduced in functionality in a future release.

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📰News and Opinion

🔨Support and HowTos

🍏Apple Support

♻️Updates and Releases

🎧To Listen

📚Support

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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2018-01-19

New Office! New remote control solution for Macs! New ‘Apple at Work’ pages!

Lots of new and interesting things this week to read up and keep up with.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

#! On Scripting OS X

📰News and Opinion

🔨Support and HowTos

🍏Apple Support

♻️Updates and Releases

🎧To Listen

📖To Read

📚Support

I do not have any ads on my webpage or this newsletter. However, if you want to support me and this website, then please consider buying one (or both) of my books. (Imagine it’s like a subscription fee, but you also get one or two useful books on top!)

If you have already bought and read the books, please leave a review on the iBooks Store. Reviews are important to help new potential readers make the purchase decision. Thank you (again)!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2018-01-12

Things have quieted down a bit after the Meltdown and Spectre turmoil last week. Apple has pushed updates for iOS, High Sierra, and Safari for older macOS versions.

There also was another macOS password bug, but this one is more specific and less dramatic than the #iamroot bug was.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

#! On Scripting OS X

📰News and Opinion

🔨Support and HowTos

🍏Apple Support

♻️Updates and Releases

📚Support

I do not have any ads on my webpage or this newsletter. However, if you want to support me and this website, then please consider buying one (or both) of my books. (Imagine it’s like a subscription fee, but you also get one or two useful books on top!)

If you have already bought and read the books, please leave a review on the iBooks Store. Reviews are important to help new potential readers make the purchase decision. Thank you (again)!

Get an Icon for your Mac

A few weeks ago I had a post about getting the “Marketing Name” for a Mac.

At that time I was also trying to get an icon or image file for the current Mac model, but could not find a way to do it.

Since then I have found that the AppKit framework provides a method to get an image for the Mac.

[NSImage imageNamed: NSImageNameComputer] # Objective-C

NSImage(named: .computer) # Swift

To get this image data into a file requires some passing through other classes. However, this is possible in Python on macOS. (I had some trouble, but figured it out with some help in the MacAdmins Slack #python channel, thanks!)These are the posts that were recommended reading or watching:

In case you need an image file for the Mac, here is the code. It will generate a 512px image for the current Mac. The two lines you may want to change are line 7 for the size of the image and line 16 for the filename.

Update: improved version here (not by me)

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2018-01-05

Happy New Year, everyone!

For those who follow the Gregorian way of counting trips around the sun, anyway.

2018 is certainly not starting slowly. We got a good look at Secure Boot in the iMac Pro thanks to Tim Perfitt. And then we got two major security problems, endearingly called ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

#! On Scripting OS X

🎇Turn of Year

🖥iMac Pro

🔐Meltdown and Spectre

📰News and Opinion

🔨Support and HowTos

🍏Apple Support

♻️Updates and Releases

🛠Open Source

📺To Watch

🎧To Listen

📚Support

I do not have any ads on my webpage or this newsletter. However, if you want to support me and this website, then please consider buying one (or both) of my books. (Imagine it’s like a subscription fee, but you also get one or two useful books on top!)

If you have already bought and read the books, please leave a review on the iBooks Store. Reviews are important to help new potential readers make the purchase decision. Thank you (again)!

MacAD.UK Interview on self-publishing Books

To build up anticipation for their conference, MacAD.UK are posting articles and interviews with the speakers. Today, you can hear me speak about my books and process on self publishing and (seemingly but not really unrelated) how much I like the “Harry Potter” series.

Want to write a book? Armin Briegel Talks Self Publishing macOS and iBooks

And, yes, now it is official, I will speak at MacAd.UK. You will learn the topic in the interview.

Watch the interview and then go get my books!