The year is not starting slowly. We got the third round of betas for macOS 14.3 and iOS 17.3, which fix the "bricking" issue some users had with iOS 17.3 beta 2. Apple has also announced the release date for Apple Vision Pro.
The migration of this newsletter is proceeding well. Next week, I plan to move the website. A bit sad that the standalone MacAdmins.news website wasn't meant to last very long, but the new setup means I will not have to maintain the email form of the newsletter separately from the web site anymore, which saves a lot of effort. Aside from the appearance, this should not affect anything, except that the RSS feed URL will change.
I plan to import the current subscriber base to the new service the week of Jan 22, just in time for the 300th issue of the Scripting OS X/MacAdmins.news weekly on Jan 26. Then, you will hopefully and thankfully not have to hear about this again for a long time.
I have been cross posting the last few issues to the new service for the last few weeks. If you are curious you can already check it out and subscribe there. That'll also help me shake out any issues that might still remain. Let me know what you think!
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📸 Focus
Apple Vision Pro available in the U.S. on February 2
Apple Vision Pro was announced for "early 2024" and Apple is keeping that promise. Initial release is US only. That and the price point will limit initial adoption, but I believe all Apple admins are very curious to see not only how this device works, but also how this device will fit into work environments.
So far, no information on management capabilities for visionOS has been released. Even though visionOS is yet another iOS derivate, I find it likely that we will not have management capabilities in the 1.0 release. Even with all the secrecy, I think we would have seen some signature of visionOS support in the MDM developer documentation.
But, there might be a visionOS 1.1 coinciding with macOS 14.4 and iOS 17.4 in April/May and this "Spring Update" has often brought new management features for all of Apple's platform. Or we may have to wait until a later, major release of visionOS for management support. That would not be unprecedented.
📰 News and Opinion
Fixing Macs Door to Door
"Like all of my bosses early on, his primary quality was he was a bad judge of character."
A fun read about the personal support side of computing.
⚙️ Apple Updates
🔐 Security and Privacy
seclook: Automatic security lookups from your clipboard
"seclook is a macOS/Swift app that sits in the background and monitors your clipboard, sending any IP, SHA2/MD5 hash, or domain to VirusTotal and AbuseIPDB. If any scanned item has a bad reputation score, you get a notification"
Tailored Event Monitoring on macOS
Write your own custom analytics for custom macOS event monitoring.
🔨 Support and Tutorials
The Continuity Camera and "Unlock With Apple Watch" Conspiracy
"Continuity Camera became a feature that I need to work reliably. Sadly, it doesn’t. Half of the time, apps like Zoom and Discord on macOS could not see the iPhone SE in the list of available cameras. […] I had to find a fix for this bug, or at least a way to work around it."
Clearing the logged-in Microsoft SSO user on macOS using Microsoft’s Company Portal app
"I really needed to have the application in question prompt the user for which account they needed to log in with because a user account other than the one registered for single sign-on needed to be able to sign in to the application in question."
Upcoming change will enforce LAPS on Prestage admin accounts
"A big change is coming to Jamf soon and Jamf seem to think it’ll be well received all around: forced LAPS for Prestage (ADE/DEP) admin accounts"
Unlocking Insights: An Introductory Guide to Integrating Jamf Pro and Microsoft Power BI for Powerful Reporting
"Guide through the process of integrating Jamf Pro and Power BI. Topics will include implementing bearer token authentication through the new API Roles & API Clients, extracting data from Jamf Pro using the API, and creating foundational dashboard graphs in Power BI."
🤖 Scripting and Automation
SpinUpVM.sh: A Convenience Script to Quickly Spin Up a macOS Test VM in UTM
"I recently discovered that UTM has a command line interface, and this inspired me to write a script to quickly clone, launch, and cleanup test VMs."
JSON & the Arg-nauts
"A somewhat recent update to the sqlite3 binary included json parsing within tables, but, it can also just be called to process data on the command line."
♻️ Updates and Releases
📺 Watch
My presentation at the Benelux Apple Admins Meetup
"I've explored many different VM tools and have shared some my experiences with them here."
The University of Utah Presentation 2023
"A presentation that picks up where my MacAdmins 2023 presentation on GUI scripting left off."