Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2022-04-29

It was a comparatively quiet week regarding Apple and macOS news. Aside from Apple making the first self repair options available, and reporting another blowout quarter.


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The news is that Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter seems to be succeeding. This upsets many, and I cannot say I am excited about this myself. I don’t see much merit in the promises of the prospective new owner, and much potential to change Twitter for the worse.

That said, I have no plans to discontinue the @scriptingosx Twitter account, at least not yet. The advantage of having my website on my own domain, is that I am mostly independent of any specific social media. I cross-post from the blog to various social media and other platforms. Twitter and LinkedIn have the largest number of followers and generate the most traffic back to the site.

I have had a Mastodon (a free, open source, federated social media) account scriptingosx@mastodon.social since 2017 and seen an uptick of new followers in the last few days. (Welcome! You can join a Mastodon server here.) Traffic from Mastodon now exceeds traffic from Scripting OS X’s Facebook page, and is quickly catching up with Apple News traffic. All of these are very low numbers compared to Twitter and LinkedIn.

Scripting OS X also has an RSS feed, so you can add it to your very own curated list of news feeds in your favored RSS News reader. Start with NetNewsWire if you don’t have one yet.

Finally, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly News Summary by email. If you are reading this, it is likely that you are already a subscriber, so thank you. But maybe you know a co-worker or other MacAdmin somewhere who isn’t yet and I would very much appreciate if you suggested this News Summary to them. Thank you!

macOS Server

News and Opinion

Social Media

  • Kat’s Mastodon Quickstart for Twitter Users – Kat Marchán
  • Steve Troughton-Smith: “From the start, we knew the App Store was a symbiotic environment designed to create value-add for Apple devices by giving devs great tools to make apps to entice customers to Apple, whilst also ensuring to deny devs any ability to ever remotely threaten Apple’s position of power” (Thread)
  • Mr. Macintosh: “Wondering why the Self Service store doesn’t look like an Apple website? The site is run by 3rd party partner ‘SPOT’ Service Parts Or Tools was incorporated on Dec 1, 2021 The original Apple announcement was on Nov 17, 2021 Total time = 5 months from announcement to live date”

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

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ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author