This is interesting - Apple will be introducing Sandboxing in March. It will also insist that any app sold in the App Store will have to implement it. From a user’s point of view, this could be good - it stops apps from being compromised and trashing your machine. However, these restrictions could force software companies reduce the functionality of apps they seen on the App Store.



I use BBEdit a lot - it’s my text editor of choice. I use it for my Freeway Actions work, as well as any general purpose writing. It’s an excellent tool for when you don”t want the distraction of styles, fonts etc..

And here is the bit that, for me, rings some alarm bells:



The bit in bold is alarming. Freeway Actions are basically JavaScript which manipulate the tag stream as Freeway builds the HTML. Suddenly, it looks as if my Actions writing days could be numbered, especially if Apple decide at Mac OSX 10.8 then it will only allow Macs to run software bought on the App Store.

We will see what the developments are.

http://www.macworld.com/article/163391/ ... _wary.html

I've not looked into it, but I don't see how these things can't be achieved with sandboxing. It's going to be a hell of a lot of work to make features work as my understanding is that you push out certain work to individual 'helper' apps which are locked down in in almost everything other than what their helping with. It might have been in the WWDC or perhaps another video I was watching...
QuickTime does it, it now has a helper app which does video playing or editing or something...Though I guess Apple are allowed to use private APIs...

I think that's a little premature to worry about to be honest. Apart from the fact we have no idea how big an update 10.8 is likely to be (could be a lion, could be a snow leopard) or when it's due, there's next to no chance of Mac OS going 'App Store only' while the real software big guns - like MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite - aren't on it. If Apple did attempt to impose that policy, it'd probably be the lowest selling version of Mac OS in history. Plus pretty much every mac user has an existing library of software they have paid for that either isn't on the app store or is and they don't feel much like paying for it again. And how would it marry with things like Steam - I'm pretty sure that would never be App Store compliant, almost by definition.

There's a world of difference between being 'app store only' from the start - like iOS is - and attempting to impose that restriction on the whole population after they've had a decade or more of not being subject to it.

People have been raising that bogeyman since the Mac App Store launched but Apple show no signs of any interest in actually doing it.

Jon

No, the idea of passing off things to 'worker apps' is well discussed in the Apple developer docs. IIRC there's a good Ars Technica article about it as well - may have been part of their gargantuan Lion review now I think of it.

The problem is the sandboxing requires the worker apps to be part of the app bundle. So you can't do the classic photoshop plugin idea. And you can't allow people to modify the bundle because that would break under sandboxing too.

All the possible solutions I can think of do require some sort of OS level tinkering from Apple. And who knows if that's going to happen.

It's the making-a-plugin-that-doesn't-ship-with-the-original-app problem that most alarms me. We'll wait and see...

yet.

Well, you could equally say Kiera Knightly has shown no signs of being desperate to sleep with me. Yet.

Jon

true but I think I know which one is more likely

I know which one I'd prefer but I'm not laying odds either way .

Will Shipley's take - interesting.

Jon