I’m very grateful to all those who have commented on the first version of Skint, my free utility for monitoring the security systems on your Mac, and a companion to SilentKnight. I’m particularly grateful to those who pointed out the errors Skint reported when run on Macs with more than one bootable system, where it incorrectly claimed that the SSV wasn’t enabled, when it was.

That check used the command call
csrutil authenticated-root status
which works well across both architectures of Mac, unless they have more than one bootable system, when it goes into interactive mode and asks which boot system you want to check. As that can’t be performed inside an app, its response was misinterpreted.

I don’t know of any solution to this on Intel Macs, so if you run Skint version 1.01 on one of those with multiple boot systems, it will simply report that it can’t check SSV status.

There is an alternative that works on Apple silicon Macs, using system_profiler, which is already used by SilentKnight, but doesn’t work with Intel Macs. Although this always reports SSV status, it does so using the primary language used by that Mac. To cut a long and intensely frustrating story short, I wasted several weeks trying to obtain the result in English, but there’s no way around that. As Skint can’t parse 40 or more different languages to try to understand their responses, this means that, for Apple silicon Macs, Skint can only check multiple boot volumes when the primary language is English.

So, in Skint 1.01:

• if your Mac has a single boot system, that will be checked and reported properly;
• if yours is an Intel Mac with multiple boot systems, then the SSV won’t be checked;
• if it’s an Apple silicon Mac with multiple boot systems and a primary language of English, then that will be checked and reported;
• if it’s an Apple silicon Mac with multiple boot systems and a primary language that isn’t English, then the SSV won’t be checked.

I apologise for this complexity, but there appears to be no way to get macOS to respond to a simple question with a simple answer.

This update also blocks an unintentional Easter Egg that let you change its colour well to the colour of your choice. Although I thought that was fun, apparently that’s not allowed.

Skint version 1.01 is now available from here: skint101
Although the previous version will report that this new version is available, it doesn’t yet offer a full auto-update facility, but at least it won’t nag you if you don’t update.

I once again welcome your comments, please.