Since I assemble and publish this news summary on Friday mornings (European Time), I sometimes just miss interesting news dropping on Friday afternoon in US. Usually, Friday afternoon news in bad news for the organisation releasing it.
Exactly this happened last Friday. After two weeks of seemingly non-stop releases, on Friday afternoon Apple cancelled the AirPower charging mat which was pre-announced at the iPhone X event in September 2017.
On the other hand, a different pre-announcement made at WWDC last year was fulfilled this week. BBEdit is back in the Mac AppStore! (No secret that BBEdit is my favored text editor, I wrote a bit about why last year.)
Also, the email version of this summary broke through 500 subscribers! Thank you all! (And keep spreading the word.)
We also got a lot of great posts with helpful advice from various MacAdmins. As usual a huge thank you to everyone who so willingly shares their experience.
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
- Apple cancels AirPower product, citing inability to meet its high standards for hardware – Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch
- MacADUK 2019: Highlights & What I’m Taking Forward – Tom Bridge
- Ultimate 2019 guide to identifying phishing emails – Jon Xavier, Fleetsmith Blog
- Bad UI: MacOS 10.14’s Software Update Release Notes – John Gruber, Daring Fireball (via Mat X)
🐦MacAdmins on Twitter
- MacDeployment YYC: “Last night at our MacDeploy Meetup, we were pleased to announce our plans for this year’s Conference, June 10–11 here in #yyc. 1/” (Thread)
- Nigel Kersten: “I don’t think I’ve ever really told the story on Twitter about the time Steve Jobs sent me a polite but dismissive email and then proceeded to make my life at work rather hellish.” (Thread)
- Eric Holtam: “Munki admins: Apple SUS update testing requested.”
- Libbi Garret: “Do you use Apple School Manager? Great News! Our amazing F3 Legal Council has worked with Apple Edu and determined that ASM is FERPA & Ed Code 49073.1 (AB1584) compliant! You can view/download the letter and terms on our CETPA page studentprivacy.net”
- Eric Holtam: ‘VMWare Fusion needs a feature to say “Snapshot on the next reboot because I’m going to forget and waste hours of prep time”’
- Tim Perfitt: “Work is progressing on #MDS 1.6. You can specify variables when creating workflows that causing techs to get prompted and the values are passed to your scripts. This is so awesome you might need to sit down for a bit.”
- Rene Ritchie: “Apple has dropped its #HomePod price to US$299 (down from US$349). Similar cuts internationally.”
- Suzana Ilić: “This is really neat! You take a screenshot of an equation, it gives you the LaTeX code, you can directly modify in the taskbar, copy, paste, done. mathpix.com”
🐞Bugs and Security
- Safari Link Tracking Can No Longer Be Disabled – Michael Tsai
- The TL;DR on Apple’s macOS Mojave 10.14.4 Gmail/G-Suite Issue: It’s Fixed – Dave Hamilton, The Mac Observer
- How to Reverse Malware on macOS Without Getting Infected, Part 1 – Philip Stokes, Sentinel One
🔨Support and HowTos
- Quantum computing and APFS: free and used space – Howard Oakley
- DEP Nag, Jamf Pro and Unexpected Status (403) – Bart Reardon
- Reclaiming Disk Space From Xcode – Michael Tsai
- Apple replaces 2019–002 Security Updates for 10.13 and 10.12. BridgeOS updates also show as new – Mr. Macintosh
- Back to school: studentd and Classroom in Mojave 10.14.4 – Howard Oakley
- Running a command tool or app results in an error ‘dyld: Library not loaded’ – Howard Oakley
- Introducing Jamf Pro Dark Mode (unofficial) | Discussion | Jamf Nation
- Installing earlier versions of macOS from the Recovery Partition with MDS – Twocanoes Software
- Firefox Configuration Profile Support – Darren Wallace
🤖Scripting and Automation
- Pulling handwritten notes into a shortcut – Dave Mark
- LoginWindow-AdminHostInfo – Alex Narvey
- How to set the icon for a folder or file with a little bit of PyObjC – Babo D’s Corner
- Math in the Shell – Twocanoes Software
- Automate it! Hedge API example apps – Mat X
- Updates to the erase-install.sh script – Graham R Pugh
- How to Upload Packages to Jamf Cloud using Autopkgr – HCS Technology Group
🍏Apple Support
♻️Updates and Releases
- Spring updates for Zentral
- Munki 3.6.1
- Jamf Pro 10.11.1
- BBEdit on the Mac App Store
- Mac App Store FAQs for BBEdit Customers
- BBEdit 12.6.3 Release Notes
- Where Respect Is Due : App Store Story
- Steve Troughton-Smith: “If you’re curious about BBEdit’s MAS entitlements, as I was, you can see them here; it says a lot that everybody is still relying on ‘temporary’ sandbox exceptions just to make life in the MAS possible gist”
🎧To Listen
📚 Support
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