Following right after the release of the iOS 12.1.3 and macOS Mojave 10.13.3 updates last week, members of the developer/beta/seed programs got access to iOS 12.2 and macOS Mojave 10.14.4.
Even though the release notes are still quite thin, these will probably be the “Spring Updates” with some major changes, so they are worth watching and testing. The release notes for Xcode 10.2, which brings Swift 5 and Safari 12.1 are already quite interesting.
Other than that, we got Apple’s quarterly numbers, a weird FaceTime bug, which made Apple shut down the Group FaceTime servers, and a kerfuffle on dubious VPN/data gathering apps which led Apple to block the Facebook and Google Enterprise Developer certificates.
On the MacAdmin side, some great and timely posts on Mac App Store Office apps and Adobe’s new Shared Device Licensing.
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On Scripting OS X
News and Opinion
- How to Manage Your Fear of Public Speaking – Sarah Milstein
- Last Week on My Mac: mid-life mistakes – Howard Oakley
- Apple to lower iPhone prices in some international markets that were most impacted by currency fluctuations – Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac
MacAdmins on Twitter
- Julia Evans: “curl… ”
- Tim Perfitt: “I am told by marketing people that showing you this nice photo of the MDS Automaton will convince you to buy one.”
- Tim Perfitt: “I created this fine video on using Mac Deploy Stick to install macOS, MS Office 2016, 2 browsers, and a forking Boot Camp partition with Windows 10! How long? Holy shirt! 21 minutes from start to finish. Grab some popcorn.”
- Jason Broccardo: “#macadmins looking for lightweight monitoring for Jamf Pro, I’ve started using JavaMelody. Just need to drop a couple jars into the WEB-INF folder and restart your app to get going. Get nagios-like graphs and data.”
Bugs and Security
- FaceTime bug allows instant audio, potential video access — fix on the way – Rene Ritchie, iMore
- Apple’s FaceTime privacy bug allowed possible spying – Thomas Reed, Malwarebytes Labs
Support and HowTos
- macOS and 32-bit applications – Scott Knight
- Deploying Microsoft Office from the Mac App Store – Ben Toms
- Why can’t I open that document? Troubleshooting LaunchServices – Howard Oakley
- Jamf Connect Login with Azure – Frederick Abeloos
- Code signing for the concerned: 5 Signing and privacy control – Howard Oakley
- Adobe Shared Device Licensing – Ben Toms
- Adobe Shared Device Licensing – Answers to questions you probably didn’t want to ask – Neil Martin
- Reversing ‘pkgutil’ to Verify PKGs – Patrick Wardle (very technical)
Scripting and Automation
- macOS Quick Action to rename photos and videos by timestamp – Paul Galow
- Python Script To Move A SQL Database To .csv Files – Charles Edge
- Migrating Microsoft Office Suite to MAS deployment – Daz Wallace
- Detecting installed 32-bit applications on macOS Mojave – Rich Trouton
Apple Support
- Xcode 10.2 beta Release Notes
- Swift 5 Release Notes for Xcode 10.2 beta
- macOS Mojave 10.14.4 beta Release Notes
- iOS 12.2 beta Release Notes
- Safari 12.1 Release Notes
- macOS Support Essentials 10.14 (with a new Exam Preparation Guide in six languages, via Arek Dreyer)
Updates and Releases
- Munki 3.6 Release Candidate 1
- ZuluDesk Scripting
- twocanoes / push-diagnostics (now open source, via Tim Perfitt)
To Listen
Support
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