hoakley Macs, Technology

LockRattler 4.2 released: browses current version info and more

I am delighted to announce the release of the new version of LockRattler, 4.2, which is available from here: lockrattler42
and in Downloads above.

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Changes since version 4.1 include:

  • adds a new button Check blog, which opens a browser window within the app, and displays latest versions of security data files from pages on this site;
  • adds the ability to download and install individual named packages, as well as installing all those available;
  • whenever possible, now runs online checks and installations in the background, so you shouldn’t see the spinning beachball;
  • updated PDF documentation and Help book.

The first of these is new since 4.2b1, and should address the problem of determining whether your Mac is up to date. I had been pondering how best to do this. Ideally, I would have liked LockRattler to be able to check automatically for you, but for the moment that is very complex, and would involve setting up a server to deliver the information to it in, say, JSON format. My next idea was to simply open the right page in the default web browser, but I knew that I could do better than that.

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I have therefore created three special pages on this blog which contain just the version information for El Capitan, Sierra, and High Sierra. When you click on the Check blog button, LockRattler creates a WebKit browser window, and opens the appropriate page for the version of macOS which is running.

Although it lacks the controls found in normal browsers, this browser window is perfectly capable of browsing other pages on this site and others. This should save you from accessing this site’s pages through the links in the Help book, or directly in your browser, in order to determine whether your versions are up to date.

Just to make it completely clear: all LockRattler does is fetch one of three web pages from this site. It doesn’t use cookies, and doesn’t upload anything from the app at all, and it uses HTTPS throughout. In case you’re still suspicious, tomorrow I will show the code that it uses to do this.

If you have any feature requests for the next version, please comment here.