• iPhone

    Disable Offload Unused Apps If You Use A Lot Of Sensors In The Home

    The Offload Unused Apps feature on an iPhone is great to save space and keep devices secure. This keeps documents and settings for apps that haven’t been used for awhile but removes the app bundle itself. For those with a lot of “set it and forget it” sensors in the home it can be a bit problematic. Once an app is disabled, push notifications no longer get sent to the app. So if a carbon monoxide monitor or water sensor goes off, installed for a little peace of mind, then the app might not be alerting you (maybe an email as a backup). To disable this feature, open the Settings…

  • iPhone,  JAMF,  Java

    Automate and Distribute Apple Shortcuts

    Shortcuts (prior to being acquired by Apple it was called Workflow) is a free app for iOS that provides automated actions, similar to AppleScript or Automator workflows. Users can make Shortcuts or download Shortcuts other people have made. Shortcuts are javascript wrapped in a binary property list. You can easily create a Shortcut by opening the Shortcuts app and tapping on Create Shortcut. You’ll then see a list of apps that can be used with Shortcuts. for this example we’ll use Email Address. Tap here and you’ll be prompted to Allow Access to Email addresses from the Shortcut (you’ll be prompted twice actually). Then provide an email address. Select one…

  • Apple Configurator,  iPhone,  Mass Deployment

    Apple Configurator cfgutil Verbs

    Once the Apple Configurator 2 Command Line Tools are installed, you’ll find a binary called cfgutil at /Applications/Apple Configurator 2.app/Contents/MacOS/cfgutil. The cfgutil command has a number of verbs you can see by running the command followed by the help verb, as follows: /Applications/Apple\ Configurator\ 2.app/Contents/MacOS/cfgutil help The following is a list of officially supported verbs: activate: activate iOS and iPadOS devices.  add-tags: add a tag for iOS and iPadOS devices. backup: Create a backup of an iOS or iPadOS device the Configurator computer has prepared. clear-passcode: Clear the passcode a supervised iOS or iPad OS device. erase: Erase any content and settings configured on any supervised iOS and iPadOS devices. exec:…

  • Apple TV,  Apple Watch,  Apps,  iPhone,  JAMF,  Mac Security,  MacAdmins Podcast

    Notes from the Underground: Apple WWDC and You

    Apple kicked off the annual WWDC conference yesterday and boy there was a flurry of information. There always is, but for people charged with managing Apple devices and vendors that support Apple devices there were some important releases. Some general themes to think about as you read through this list: Privacy is a thing. This includes securing files in the directories of a user by having the user accept a request to touch them (e.g. My Documents, er, I mean, Documents). This also means apps harvesting user data are doomed. The restrictions continue to flow in from iOS to the Mac. And that’s probably a good thing – as it…

  • iPhone,  JAMF

    Transfer Text In And Out Of The iOS Simulator Using xcrun

    In a previous article, I covered creating, starting, and stopping iOS simulations. macOS comes with a handy tool to interact with the clipboard (aka pasteboard) on a Mac called pbcopy. You can redirect information from a file into your clipboard using the pbcopy command. Here, we’ll simply call pbcopy and then a file path pbcopy ~/Desktop/transfer.txt You can then redirect your text into simctl by doing a pbpaste into xcrun simctl pbpaste booted Once you’ve copied your data, clean up the transfer file: rm ~/Desktop/transfer.txt You can also pull text out. If you write data into the clipboard (e.g. during instrumentation) then you can extract it from that pasteboard using…

  • iPhone

    Managing The Xcode Simulator Programmatically

    The iOS Simulator is a great way to test watchOS, tvOS, and iOS apps while you’re writing them. The easiest way to work with the simulator is through Xcode. But you can also use simctl for interacting with it, helpful in automating QA operations when possible. The simctl binary is located at /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/simctl and typically accessed as a verb from the /usr/bin/xcrun command.  First let’s list all the simulators, done using the list command, called by simply running xcrun followed by simctl for the type of operation to be run and then the list command: /usr/bin/xcrun simctl list The output shows a lot of device types, runtimes, and devices, most…