Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Mr. Macintosh Explains Another Way to Block the Software Update Prompts for MacOS 26 Tahoe
Last month I posted an item (linking to a post from Rob Griffiths) explaining how to hide the prompts in System Settings to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. The technique I posted involved hand-editing a device management profile.
This video from Mr. Macintosh shows how to do the same thing, but using the free iMazing Profile Editor to create the device profile instead of hand-editing the XML Property List. If you were spooked or put off by the original technique, but want to stay on MacOS 15 Sequoia and hide all the prompts related to Tahoe, watch this video.
MacOS 15.7.5 Sequoia came out this week alongside Tahoe 26.4, and it was delightful only to see the update notice for 15.7.5 in System Settings.
‘A List of Chain Restaurants Whose Names Contain Unusual Structures’
When I first read this post from my friend Paul Kafasis last week — a One Foot Tsunami instant classic — I was hoping that I could think of an example that he missed. I can’t say I did.
The closest, though, is ShowBiz Pizza Place, a 1980s archrival to Chuck E. Cheese. (Instead of a pizza-cooking rat, ShowBiz had Billy Bob, a pizza-cooking hillbilly bear.) Place is an unusual noun to put in a restaurant name, but it isn’t a structure, so it doesn’t belong on Kafasis’s list. But what brings it to mind is that growing up, we had a ShowBiz Pizza Place near our mall, and I loved going there because it was a damn good arcade (and the pizza, I thought at the time, was pretty good — cut into small squares, not slices). They had the sit-down version of Star Wars, the best way to play the best coin-op game in history. (Two tokens to play that one, of course.) They had the sit-down version of Spy Hunter, too. Anyway, generally we all just referred to the joint as “ShowBiz”, but one thing that drove me nuts is that a few of my friends, when referring to it by its full name, called it ShowBiz Pizza Palace. It was like hearing someone call an iPod Touch an “iTouch”. And while I loved the place, trust me, it was not palatial — unless you’re familiar with palaces that are really dark and seedy, and had ball pits where bad things happened.
Improved Analytics in App Store Connect
Apple Developer:
Analytics in App Store Connect receives its biggest update since its launch, including a refreshed user experience that makes it easier to measure the performance of your apps and games.
There’s a lot that’s new, but all the data is still collected with an emphasis on user privacy. There’s an all-new support guide that documents everything.
John Voorhees, writing at MacStories:
Since the changes rolled out, a couple of concerns I’ve seen expressed online are that there will no longer be a single place to view the aggregate performance of multiple apps and that the new default reporting period is three months. Those concerns are well founded. The changes are organized on an app-by-app basis, and as Apple says in a banner on App Store Connect, the Dashboards in the Trends section of Connect and related reports where that data was available are being deprecated later this year and next. So, while the data Apple offers is deep for each app, the aggregate data falls short by not providing a birds-eye view of a developer’s entire app catalog.
For what it’s worth, Apple is aware of the feedback regarding cross-app reporting. Also, the shorter sales reporting periods, such as the past 24 hours and seven days, are still available, but they’re less visible because three months is the new default.