• Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Debugging and Deploying iBooks

    Just got to do my first troubleshooting for the iBooks app in OS X. Wasn’t a ton of info, so went digging for the debug menu that has become a staple of so many Apple apps. And it turns out that it was there. Looking at the plist for iBooksX prefs: defaults read com.apple.iBooksX This shows that we can go ahead and deploy a key to suppress the welcome screen (nice little deployment note made there) and a few other things. But what I was looking for is that BKShowDebugMenu key { BKAlreadyDisplayedWelcomeExperience = 1; "BKBookshelfCategoryManager~012384" = 1; BKBookshelfViewControllerFilterAction = 5; BKBookshelfViewControllerSortAction = 1; BKShowDebugMenu = 0; BKSimulateCrashDuringMigration = 0;…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Uncategorized

    Viewing Mac App Store Purchases From The Command Line

    As you may have noticed, we’ve been working on building some links between the App Store and patch management tools such as Casper, FileWave and Munki. We’ve been looking at policy-based management of apps as well. In this semi-new world of signing and stores and the such, there’s actually a good bit you can ascertain about an app both inside the app as well as inside metadata OS X keeps about the app. I’ve discussed signing (apps and packages) in the past, but let’s look at using some commands to help us out with some tasks. The first command is to determine some information about apps that are on the…