Code Signing with Apple Tools Outside The Keychain We have been working on a project that solves the problem of code signing with Apple tools with a private key that is not located in the keychain of the Mac that is doing the signing. The private key can be kept on a centralized server accessible…
Twocanoes Software is a small software company that focuses on macOS software. We make software that does things that some people may not need but others need very much. We started selling software in 2012 and the landscape has changed pretty dramatically in the past 7 years. App stores are now very common as well…
Apple recently announced that new Mac developer accounts (and eventually all mac developers) who distribute Mac apps outside the app store will be required to submit app for notarization. The notarization was announced at WWDC 2018 and was optional, but Apple was clear that it was going to be required in a future version of…
macOS 10.14.5 is going to require notarization for macOS apps to run on a Mac. I had to modify our build scripts in Xcode to add in notarization. The hard part was that the notarization had to happen in the middle of the build process. Our prior process did this: Archive Build->Package->Add to DMG We…
I recently had to update a script that ran in bash that was failing. It was due to the lack of “bc” on the system (the script runs in recovery mode on the Mac). I was using bc to do some math to calculate a percentage of a number like this: While this might be…
I sent this letter out to our newsletter list today. Explains a bit what MDS is and why we did it. –tim Hello. This is Tim Perfitt from Twocanoes Software. We recently released MDS, formally known as Mac Deploy Stick. We shortened the name to MDS since it has already grown beyond just a USB flash…
The macOS installer has gone to a more sleek, black screen. However, sometimes it is helpful to see the installer log and get access to utilities. Check out the video to see how to use the keyboard shortcut command-option-control-w to switch back to the standard macOS installer. Also, get access to a grayed out menu…
I recently was working on a Mac app to flash an Arduino using the open source project avrdude in my Mac app, and got it working as expected. I then looked at submitting the app to the Mac app store. I had expected that the avrdude binary needed to be signed and placed in the…
While investigating support for Winclone for the amazing new T2 Macs (including the new 2018 MacBook Air and 2018 Mac mini), I discovered that the way Boot Camp Assistant installs Windows has changed a bit. The Old Way (prior to T2 Macs) Boot Camp Assistant creates two FAT32 partitions from space on the Mac volume…
In the last few months, people installing Windows on their Macs with Boot Camp Assistant have started seeing the message “An Error occurred while copying the Windows installation files” when using some Windows 10 ISO downloaded from Microsoft. I have seen it a lot since I do testing with ISO of Windows Enterprise downloaded…
I do a lot of work with Beacons, and having a great Mac app to find nearby iBeacons is really handy. I wrote an app call Beacon Scan that makes it easy to find nearby iBeacons and Eddystone beacons (the Google take on iBeacons). It also has a new Dark Mode for Mojave! Some…
We have updated Salute, a macOS app that allows you to easily do common keyboard commands. Salute started as a way to do the “three finger salute” on a Mac. People using Windows press control-alt-delete and then press return to lock their screen. Salute takes this same idea and add some additional tasks. Aside from…
There is a bunch of customizations you can do to the standard macOS Login Window. All of them work on macOS 10.14 Mojave. All of them I didn’t know about until I did. Now it is your turn. See how many you already know and tweet the results to @tperfitt for honor and glory. 1….
A great dive by Rich Trouton into using MDM to manage the new privacy dialogs in macOS 10.14 Mojave: What this means is that you may be able to whitelist your most common interactions and prevent them from displaying dialogs. Read all about it on Rich’s Der Flounder blog.
Nice article by Rich Mogull @ TidBits on the new privacy settings in macOS 10.14 Mojave: For most Mac users, the most obvious and significant changes are the enhanced notifications and protections for managing access to core privacy-related data stores: Location, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Photos. Read the article here. (h/t to scriptingosx)
To troubleshoot an issue with Windows 10 (especially boot-related issues), it can be handy to boot to Windows 10 that is not installed on a Boot Camp partition. It is relatively straightforward to create a bootable USB Flash drive to boot to the Windows 10 installer, and then open up a DOS prompt for troubleshooting….
After migrating my 2018 MacBook Pro from a 2017 MacBook Pro, I found that I could no longer authenticate in the Startup Security Utility on the recovery partition of 10.13 (High Sierra). The 2018 MacBook Pro had FileVault turned on and the 2017 MacBook Pro did not. I investigated some different methods to resolve this, and…
At this year’s PennState MacAdmin conference, we gave out over 500 sticker packs to attendees, and folks loved them. Since we had the graphics and people enjoyed them so much, we created stickers for iMessage on iOS and put them up in the App Store. Show your #macadmin love by download the stickers now on…
With the death of netboot and imaging, there is a need for automated refreshing of the macOS and initial package installation. Apple is moving towards using DEP and MDM, but that is not applicable for all scenarios, and tools such a bootstrappr and installr have come up to fill a need. These command line tools run…
Update: It looks like this no longer works and was deemed a security issue and fixed. Booting into Recovery mode can take a while since the UI has to load and a full disk check is done. There is a way to get into SIP faster: by going into single user mode in the recovery…
