Category: Weekly News

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-10-02

Another very busy week. (But aren’t they all?)

The Mojave Supplemental Update was pulled and re-released, Jamf continues buying interesting people and technology, and we got macOS Big Sur beta 9 with a feature/fix that MacAdmins have been clamoring for.

Virtual JNUC 2020 was on and had some great sessions. If you have registered you can (re-)view the sessions in the portal for three more weeks and then they will be moved to the Jamf YouTube channel. Thanks to everyone who presented a session, I have not been to watch the all (not even close) but will try to over the next few weeks. Thanks also, to everyone who watched my session live and for all the kind feedback I have already gotten. You can find the slides, notes and links for my session here.

Don’t fall into the post-conference slump just yet, because MacSysAdmin Online will be next week!. Participation is free, but you can still support the team by buying the MacSysAdmin Online T-Shirt, which will also enroll you in an exclusive giveaway raffle.

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.)

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

macOS Catalina 10.15 and iOS 13 Updates

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Steve Hayman: “Your grep one-liner du jour. Count how many words of each length appear in the /usr/share/dict/words dictionary. for n in $(jot 25); do printf "%2d letter words: " $n; grep -E "^.{$n}\$" /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l; done” (Thread)

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

Updates and Releases

To Watch

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-09-25

If you thought that the week after the iOS 14 release would be a quiet week, you would have been wrong.

We got updates for the Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and iMovie, the first bug fix updates for iOS 14 and siblings, macOS Big Sur beta8 and, quite surprisingly: 10.15.7.

It makes you wonder why this update got the 10.15.7 and not “yet another Supplemental Update,” but this is a very welcome change. Many thanks to Mr Macintosh and Howard Oakley for covering the updates so well.

Virtual JNUC 2020 is next week! (September 29 through October 1). My session will be on “Scripting Jamf Pro: Best Practices” on Oct 1 at 11am CDT (18:00 Central European). There will be a live Q&A during and after the session. You can still register for free.

The MacSysAdmin Online will be later in October. Participation will be free, but you can support the team by buying the MacSysAdmin Online T-Shirt, which will also enroll you in an exclusive giveaway raffle.

And just in this week, the “EveryWorld” conference will be online from November 25 to 27. There is a call for participation.

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.)

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur

macOS Catalina 10.15 and iOS 14 Updates

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Steve Hayman: “Well that’s easy.” (Read the thread for some Hayman scripting wisdom.)
  • Carl Ashley: “The elephant in the room: Keeping up to date with OS/app releases isn’t always important. Sometimes, being able to get s**t done with something that works is more important.” (Thread)
  • William Smith: “Next month, support for Microsoft Office for Mac changes in two ways: 1. With the release of Big Sur, only these N–2 versions are supported: macOS Big Sur macOS Catalina macOS Mojave 2. Office 2016 for Mac is end-of-lifed. Updates end. Support ends. KB docs begin retiring.”
  • mikey: “TIL there’s an osascript cache at ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.osascript/Cache.db”
  • Carl Ashley: “Why is it, that in 2020, after many years of having MDM available, are we still not yet able to specify values to pass on to Setup Assistant, or even values for the settings that Setup Assistant sets that we can use in normal profile payloads?” (Thread)

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

iWork 10.2 updates

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-09-18

Update season has started. After the event on Tuesday, where Apple announced new Watches and iPads, iOS 14 shipped on Wednesday, giving developers and admins less than 24 hours advance warning and probably the shortest lived GM ever.

We also got macOS Big Sur beta 7 and new betas for iOS 14.2 and siblings.

The future releases of hardware and software this year should remain interesting. I expect at least two more events like this, one focussing on the new iPhones and the other for a new Apple Silicon Mac (or more). I would also guess that we will get the “missing” iOS 14.1 with the new iPhones, and 14.2 shortly after.

The reason this newsletter is a bit later than usual, is that I was finishing recording and editing my presentation for MacSysAdmin Online to submit it today, just in time for the deadline. This is the second presentation for a major MacAdmin conference that I recorded and finished this month. It feels strange that neither of these presentations will be streamed until October, but I am very much looking forward to when you get to see them and all the other presentations from both conferences.

Virtual JNUC 2020 is happening September 29 through October 1. My session will be on “Scripting Jamf Pro: Best Practices” on Oct 1 at 11am CDT (18:00 Central European). There will be a live Q&A during and after the session. You can still register for free.

The MacSysAdmin Online will be later in October. Participation will be free, but you can support the team by buying the MacSysAdmin Online T-Shirt, which will also enroll you in an exclusive giveaway raffle.

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.)

Apple Event: Time Flies

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Mr. Macintosh: “I’m hearing that the Jamf Pro 10.24 beta Big Sur fixes are in 10.24.1. Official support will be listed in the patch notes of 10.25 (not sure on 10.25 version numbering). 10.24.1 = Big Sur compatible. 10.25 = Big Sur official supported version.”
  • Andreas Schenk: “Using an iPad as an additional screen for macOS with sidecar seems to still deliver notifications from iPadOS, even if macOS is in DND mode. So if you happen to run a presentation using sidecar, first set the iPad to do not disturb, then use sidecar.”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-09-11

Apple has announced an event next week September 15, 10am PDT. They have seeded many people in the press and on social media with the information that there will be no iPhones at this event. Expectations are for a new watch and iPad Air.

A new watch will likely require watchOS 7, which will require iOS 14, so the Apple systems upgrade season will start soon after this event. If previous years can be used to extrapolate (not at all certain this year) the iOS system upgrades could be available Friday, September 18 or September 25.

I am not concerned at all about no iPhones or Macs at this event. These will probably be remote, pre-recorded events like they did at WWDC. Apple can easily do multiple of these events until well into October, giving every product full attention.

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.)

Headlines

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

macOS Catalina 10.15 and iOS 13 Updates

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Arek Dreyer: “On your Mac, you can Option-Click the Notification Center icon to toggle Do Not Disturb.”
  • Arek Dreyer: “A bunch of Apple Reference and User Guide pages now have a ”Search the user guide” field, nice!”
  • Nathaniel Strauss: “Still true in Big Sur beta 6. Apple privacy/security team won a stupid fight… and everyone else lost. PPPC is needlessly confusing for most people. Schools won’t use Big Sur for at least 4–6 months after release. What a mess.” (More info from Michael Tsai)
  • Corey Quinn: “Myth: Companies are accelerating their cloud migrations due to COVID19. Fact: Companies are suddenly making better decisions since their executives aren’t being exposed to enterprise software ads in airports.”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-09-04

How can it be September already!? Where did the summer go?

Apple’s beta phase is heating up with a new beta release for iOS and macOS. We also got iOS and iPadOS 13.7.

Since Fall is here, so are some more virtual conferences. I will have sessions prepared for Virtual JNUC and MacSysAdmin Online.

Virtual JNUC 2020 is happening September 29 through October 1. You can still register for free.

The MacSysAdmin Online will be later in October. Participation will be free, but you can support the team by buying the MacSysAdmin Online T-Shirt, which will also enroll you in an exclusive giveaway raffle.

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.)

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

macOS Catalina 10.15 and iOS 13 Updates

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-08-28

Some great posts from fellow MacAdmins this week. New betas for iOS 14 and iOS 13.7(!) dropped, but none for macOS so far.

Remember that you can still register for Virtual JNUC 2020 for free. you won’t just get to see my great talk, but there are many other amazing talks from amazing MacAdmins.

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.)

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • William Smith: “Outlook for Mac 16.38 can let users try New Outlook. MacAdmins can manage this preference: Domain: com.microsoft.Outlook Key: EnableNewOutlook Values (integer): 0 = Switch hidden (default) 1 = Switch displayed, off 2 = Switch displayed, on 3 = Enabled, switch hidden”
  • mikeymikey: “If you’re not a full Screen aficionado – you may have seen that hovering over the zoom control gives you options you don’t care for – but did you know those options change to non-full screen windowed choices if you hold down Option?”
  • tlark: “The thing that kills me the most about TCC/PPPC is there is no real clear documentation on how to properly implement it. You stream logs, run things and play a game of whack-a-mole. I am all about increased security posture, but come on Apple, help us configure it.”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-08-21

Welcome back! I get the impression I was the only one to take a while off this summer. So many post to sort through and link to…

I will be presenting at Virtual JNUC2020 this year. My session is “Scripting Jamf: Best Practices” (JNUC307) and is scheduled for Oct 1 at 11am CT (18:00 Central European time). The entire session schedule can be reviewed on their site and you can still register for free!

I am also preparing something for the MacSysAdmin Online. This will be a free online event this year where they will publish some of the best presentations from previous years and new content as well. You can support the team by buying the MacSysAdmin Online T-Shirt, which will also enroll you in an exclusive giveaway raffle.

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.)

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

macOS Catalina 10.15 and iOS 13 Updates

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • William Smith: “Small undocumented change with Policies in Jamf Pro 10.22 that I didn’t learn about until today: New policies no longer automatically include the Restart payload.”
  • Victor (groob): “Instead of asking ”experts“ for how you’d go about doing something, tell them what you tried, and ask why it’s not working.”
  • Anthony Reimer: “Intriguing. On the new 27-inch iMac, you can not customize the 256 GB of storage on the base model. You must move up to the middle model to get 512GB or more of storage.”
  • Victor (groob): “Four betas. Four subtle ways Apple broke a core workflow in MDM zero touch provisioning. All undocumented.”
  • Graham Pugh: “Jamf Self Service policies will not run on macOS 10.12 Sierra on Jamf Pro versions 10.22 and above. Jamf will not fix this as they drop support for Sierra in the next release.”
  • Anthony Reimer: “I’ve updated my Mac Obsolescence chart with the new iMac (hopefully making an appearance in a home near me). obsolescence.jazzace.ca”
  • Per Olofsson: “Companion niche tip: creating a sparsebundle from a folder and then converting it to a compressed read only dmg is multithreaded and faster than creating the dmg directly. In my testing the resulting dmg will also be smaller.”
  • Neil Martin: “TIL in profilecreator if you long-click the export button, you can export your payloads as MCX-style plists – handy!”
  • Erik Schwiebert: “Two month alert! Microsoft support for Office 2016 for the Mac ends on October 13, 2020”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Watch

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-07-24

You can’t really tell it from the weather here in the Netherlands, but summer is here!

Summer brings more beta testing: the third beta of the new Apple systems dropped this week. It also brings vacation. This newsletter will be on vacation until late August. As usual, I will keep gathering interesting posts and links and return with a big August summary.

Hope you get to enjoy your summer and vacation. Stay safe!

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.)

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

Coronavirus and Remote Work

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Rich Trouton: “I’ve bought a share of Jamf stock. Now I can show up at both JNUC and shareholder meetings with my gripes.”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Watch

To Listen

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-07-17

No summer break yet for MacAdmins. As expected, the updates for macOS Catalina 10.15.6 and iOS 13.6 and siblings were published.

As a big reprieve for MacAdmins, the functionality of softwareupdate --ignore has been re-instated for system software updates, but only when the Mac is supervised (i.e. enrolled in MDM with Automated Deployment or user-approved MDM). This allows MacAdmins to block major updates from being installed or even notified about. This is likely a direct result of all the feedback MacAdmins have passed on to Apple.

However, this reprieve is only temporary because it is not implemented in the macOS Big Sur beta. So, keep providing feedback through all your channels to Apple, that macOS requires a managed means to block software updates for longer than 90 days, preferable indefinitely.

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.)

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

macOS Catalina 10.15 and iOS 13 Updates

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Rosyna Keller: “Please, please don’t normalize right-clicking on your app to get it to run. This is a tactic malware uses to get past Gatekeeper. Screenshot from actual malware. Even after Flash died at the end of this year, this type of social engineering will continue. I hope Adobe runs PSAs.” (Image, thread)

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Documentation

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-07-10

This week brought more reactions to WWDC news regarding macOS 11 Big Sur, iOS 14, and the Apple Silicon transition. Apple released beta 2 for all the above (excluding the DTK), which were later released as the first public beta. We also got GM betas for macOS Catalina 10.15.6 and iOS 13.6. And a new ransomware named EvilQuest, later changed to ThiefQuest.

Busy week.

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.)

WWDC Reactions

News and Opinion

macOS 11 Big Sur and iOS 14

Coronavirus and Remote Work

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Victor (groob): “Erasing macOS beta 1 in recovery and selecting ”Install macOS“ installs beta2. Neat!”
  • Mr. Macintosh: “Mobile Accounts are treated as Network Accounts in Big Sur Beta 1 & 2. FB7870925 Not that you needed another reason to move to Local Accounts”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!