Are you a system administrator or power user who needs a quick way to check if your Flash or Java plugins have been blocked by Apple? Like so:
Then XProtectPluginChecker is the status menu app for you!
Click to download.Written in BASH, sprinkled with PlistBuddy/awk/sed-Fu with a dash of mdfind magic, and wrapped with Platypus, the aim is for XProtect Plugin Checker to be able to dynamically accommodate any additions Apple might make to the Plugin Blacklist, although only Flash and Java seem to be in their crosshairs right now, who knows? Silverlight might be next, given its lack of updates (going on 10 months).
A bonus idea for making this more useful is to make a launchd script that watches the XProtect plist file(s) then fires off the XProtectPluginChecker script when they change, emailing the results to you, because knowing is half the battle!
If you find this useful or if you have some hiccups with it, let me know. UPDATE: Now with comments enabled! :]
Also related, myXProtectStatus is a similar style menu status script that lists the malware threats Apple is blocking.
Update: Fixed a little bug, that caused the script to exit without outputting if you didn’t have Java 6 installed. So if this affected you, my bad, please download the updated version from the same link above.
Update 2: D’oh copy pasted the same variable for the Java 6 version, so it reported the Local value the same as the XProtect version. Fixed that.
Seems like an excellent and much needed menu bar item (Thank you very much!), but how does it update its information? I updated Flash Player to the newest beta and did a restart, however ‘XProtect’ still shows that I have the last, blocked-by-Apple version of Flash.
Hi Stephen,
Well the guts of the app are inside the app bundle here:
XProtectPluginChecker.app/Contents/Resources/scriptIt’s using this command to obtain a version number:
defaults read /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Flash\ Player.plugin/Contents/Info CFBundleVersionYou could also see what Finder reports in the preview pane of column view in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins, although sometimes you have to click off of and back onto the plugin to get it to display the version number…
Mozilla has a plugin checker too: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/
(Update: it appears to be wildly inaccurate for the version of Flash, however most other plugins it is correct)
Adobe has an online version checker for Flash, but of course it requires that Flash isn’t blocked! http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/
If all else fails… rerun the installer :>