Keeping up on Apple developer betas and other developer software releases is a necessary part of many Mac admins’ regular routine. It’s especially important during the period between WWDC in June and the annual OS release in the fall. Fortunately, Apple provides a way to help tracking developer releases easier by publishing a notification to the following address:
https://developer.apple.com/news/releases/
This publicly-accessible notification doesn’t discuss what’s included in the newly-released software and you will still need an Apple Developer Connection account in order to get the details. For many Mac admins though, having an easy and quick way to track if the latest developer beta has been released is valuable information in itself.
To make it even more convenient, Apple also offers a RSS feed for the Developer Releases page:
https://developer.apple.com/news/releases/rss/releases.rss
You can add this feed into your RSS reader and it’ll keep you up to date. If you use Slack, another approach is to use Slack’s ability to post content from an RSS feed to a Slack channel. For more details, please see below the jump:
To enable Slack to post from the Developer Releases RSS feed to a Slack channel, you’ll need to enable the RSS application on your Slack.
The procedure on how to do this is linked below:
https://get.slack.help/hc/articles/218688467-Add-RSS-feeds-to-Slack
Once you have the RSS application installed for your Slack instance, follow the procedure below:
1. Set up a channel in Slack to receive the content from the RSS feed.
For this example, I’ve set up a channel named #apple-developer-feed.
2. In the RSS application, click the Add RSS integration button.
3. In the Feed URL blank, enter the following URL:
https://developer.apple.com/news/releases/rss/releases.rss
4. Select the channel you want the RSS feed’s content to post to from the Post to Channel drop-down menu.
In this case, it’ll be posted to the #apple-developer-feed channel.
5. Once the RSS feed and channel have been properly set up, click the Subscribe to this feed button.
The RSS feed will now show as being posted to the selected channel.
Once this is configured, Slack will now post any new content from the RSS feed to the specified Slack channel.
