Archive for April 11, 2023

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

2023 Six Colors Apple in the Enterprise Report Card

Jason Snell (tweet):

In most categories, our panel’s view of Apple in the enterprise was on an upswing. The company made large gains in the categories of enterprise service and support and in macOS identity management (its 3.3 average was still fairly low overall, but up a whopping 0.4 from last year). However, Apple took a big hit in the deployment category, which dropped 0.2 to become the lowest scoring category in the survey.

We also asked a couple of questions outside the traditional set. For the second straight year, we asked about the pace of operating-system adoption. There was a big change here, with “quicker than usual” moving from 37% last year to 51% this year. (A decision by Apple to force a Ventura update as a “minor” upgrade may be at least partially responsible—see the comments in that category for the gory details.)

[…]

More than half of the people who answered said that while they allowed the App Store, they wouldn’t want to allow third-party app stores. In their detailed comments, several expressed concern that any policy ruling that forced Apple’s hand might make it harder for admins to block third-party app stores, which would make them very unhappy.

Previously:

SVG to SwiftUI Converter

Antoni Silvestrovic (via Dave Verwer):

Tool to convert SVG to SwiftUI’s Shape structure. This approach is much more memory efficient than introducing a SVG library for rendering.

[…]

This repository is just a front-end wrapper over our svg-to-swiftui-core (npm link) package.

[…]

To demonstrate this tool I created a thicc plus sign with rounded corners (created it in Sketch, so shapes from Sketch should work fine with this tool). It’s saved as content/demo-plus.svg file in this repository. You can see below how it looks like in the browser, and how it looks like after converting into SwiftUI Shape.

Previously:

Recovery on Apple Silicon Macs Has Changed Again

Howard Oakley:

Recovery modes on Apple silicon Macs have also changed. In Big Sur, the primary Recovery system is stored in a hidden container on the internal SSD, and a fallback Recovery system in a volume alongside the boot volume group. Monterey swapped those over, so primary Recovery goes into the paired volume in the boot volume group, and fallback Recovery into the hidden container on the internal SSD.

[…]

Now, at least in Ventura 13.2.1, and presumably in recent releases of Monterey with their firmware updates, you can enter fallback Recovery with a restart, instead of having to start up cold, but that normally enters fallback rather than primary (paired) Recovery mode.

I used to be really good at administering Macs, but now I find tasks related to installing, booting, and recovery so confusing. I thought things would get simpler with Apple integrating more of the stack. But with more security stuff and multiple modes, and limitations on what third-party apps can do to help, it’s gotten more complicated and error prone, and it always seems to be changing.

Previously:

News Is Not a Normal Mac App

Jeff Johnson on the News app’s Share menu:

This doesn’t open in Safari but rather in my default web browser, which is Link Unshortener.

Any normal Mac app — including Link Unshortener — can call the API to determine which app is your default web browser.

They did restore the Open in Safari menu command, but it badly needs a keyboard shortcut. Both this command and the share menu say “Safari,” but they actually follow the Default web browser system setting. Ultimately, this is up to News, but why doesn’t the system have a built-in sharing service with the proper icon, name, and behavior?

Jeff Johnson:

The Mac News app forgets my window size on every launch.

For me, sometimes it remembers the size and sometimes it forgets.

Previously:

Update (2023-04-24): Jeff Johnson:

News forgetting the window size is actually the bug I wrote about here.

The irony is that I filed the bug against Monterey, but they wanted me to test the Ventura beta.

That seems reasonable to me if Apple can’t reproduce the issue on the latest beta or if they actually think they have fixed it. The problem is that a lot of times these requests to re-test just seem to be someone trying to blindly close lots of bugs. Then it just waste’s everyone’s time to verify a bug that is not being worked on, anyway.

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