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Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

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Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#181

Post by [deleted] »

flomo wrote: post #101
halostatue wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's APIs to interact with the calendar store; no calendar application should ever be accessing the calendar files directly—so apps like Fantastical are probably already OK. I haven't deeply examined the sandboxing rules and capabilities, but I think that this could improve application interoperability because they will need to work through APIs directly rather than through filesystem backdoors.

The prominent API for this type of data exchange is AppleEvents, which apparently won't be allowed without special permission. (Perhaps there is some other sandbox-friendly way to get calendar info ... I don't know.)

[deleted]

Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#182

Post by rayiner »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #143
dextorious wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""But the Mac's becoming more of an appliance, and while it's safer, easier, and more convenient for most users, it makes it a substantially less desirable machine for me to hack on.""" You do understand that in Lion, say, nothing, absolutely nothing has been taken away from you that you could do back in 10.1 or even NeXT. So, this "the Mac's becoming more of an appliance" is just bullshit, just blindly following th…

Dude. We know how the iPhone works. It's easy to see Apple starting to bring the same sort of model to the MacBook. We're not blind. We can see where this is going, even if it's not there yet, and make reasonably informed guesses about what it's going to be like.

A phone and a laptop are two different things, and it makes sense to lock down one in a way that it doesn't make sense to lock down the other. There is no indication that Apple doesn't understand that.

What I see with App Store sandboxing is a way to allow people to more easily try and buy apps without worrying what those apps are doing to their computer. I'm very careful about downloading and trying apps on my Mac because I don't know what files they're going to leave around on my computer or worse. Sandboxing in the App Store is a great way to make that situation better.

Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#183

Post by rayiner »

lallysingh wrote: post #155
fennecfoxen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude. We know how the iPhone works. It's easy to see Apple starting to bring the same sort of model to the MacBook. We're not blind. We can see where this is going, even if it's not there yet, and make reasonably informed guesses about what it's going to be like.

Well, you can also just watch the derivative? When's the last time the OS had a major feature that was aimed at developers? I remember the early OS X releases coming out with advance after advance. The rumored ZFS integration was the peak of this awesomeness... At least dtrace was integrated. The last thing I've seen is transparently compressed files; not exactly exciting. I think we hit the peak around the leopard-s…

XCode 4.x. Still crappy, but way better than Xcode 3.x. LLVM. Continuous improvements to the Obj-C 2.0 runtime like tagged pointers and Automatic Reference Counting. Versions, iCloud, and associated APIs for document persistence. MacRuby framework.

Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#184

Post by spc476 »

nimrody wrote: post #62
saturdaysaint wrote: post #50

This article mostly seems to ignore the fact that you can still distribute apps outside of the App Store. In fact, considering the falling costs of hosting and easy access to marketing tools (look at the quality of the website for any Mac App), it's probably never been easier. For pro apps with dedicated audiences (see: Adobe, Ableton, Avid, Nuance) which is just about anything with a plugin architecture, the App Sto…

Apple may eventually disable loading of executables which are not cryptographically signed . At this point, you'll have to resort to kernel patches to bypass that mechanism and load non-authorized applications. Hopefully, Apple will leave a way to disable code verification. At least for advanced users.

I see the following in syslog from my Mac: no system signature for unsigned /Applications/Firefox.app. I've been seeing this for the past couple of years now (and it's not restricted to Firefox by the way).

Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#185

Post by rayiner »

People are forgetting that as consumption apps move to the iPad/iPhone, more of the people left on the Mac will need the extra power of a non-locked-down environment.

Apple's goal is still to sell hardware. As long as they can create a newbie-safe experience on the Mac without locking out people who need to tinker, it buys them nothing to do so.

Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#186

Post by shinratdr »

makira wrote: post #42

The problem with the current sandboxing is the missing entitlements, for simple things like: - Using the burning framework (cd & dvd burning) - Interfacing with Apple Remotes - Having a shared container between a main app and a helper app Also, many utilities will have to be removed from the App Store because of sandboxing, and that will likely cut revenues dramatically for those developers.

> Using the burning framework (cd & dvd burning)

I wouldn't be surprised if this was intentional. I'm sort of picturing Apple killing off the 17 inch Pro, 13 inch Pro, Mac Pro, and then slimming down the iMac and 15 inch Pro by removing the optical drive. They are done with optical media. It wouldn't shock me at all to see DVD Player removed from 10.8.

> Interfacing with Apple Remotes

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure this ability was removed with 10.6. I can't control anything besides built in Apple apps on my Mac with my Apple Remote unless I install Remote Buddy + Candleair, which restores 3rd party access to the Apple Remote by using an alternate driver.

Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#187

Post by p0ckets »

rayiner wrote: post #182
fennecfoxen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude. We know how the iPhone works. It's easy to see Apple starting to bring the same sort of model to the MacBook. We're not blind. We can see where this is going, even if it's not there yet, and make reasonably informed guesses about what it's going to be like.

A phone and a laptop are two different things, and it makes sense to lock down one in a way that it doesn't make sense to lock down the other. There is no indication that Apple doesn't understand that. What I see with App Store sandboxing is a way to allow people to more easily try and buy apps without worrying what those apps are doing to their computer. I'm very careful about downloading and trying apps on my Mac b…

A phone and a tablet are two different things, and it makes sense to lock down one in a way that it doesn't make sense to lock down the other. There is no indication that Apple doesn't understand that...

Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#188

Post by cheald »

shinratdr wrote: post #186
makira wrote: post #42

The problem with the current sandboxing is the missing entitlements, for simple things like: - Using the burning framework (cd & dvd burning) - Interfacing with Apple Remotes - Having a shared container between a main app and a helper app Also, many utilities will have to be removed from the App Store because of sandboxing, and that will likely cut revenues dramatically for those developers.

> Using the burning framework (cd & dvd burning) I wouldn't be surprised if this was intentional. I'm sort of picturing Apple killing off the 17 inch Pro, 13 inch Pro, Mac Pro, and then slimming down the iMac and 15 inch Pro by removing the optical drive. They are done with optical media. It wouldn't shock me at all to see DVD Player removed from 10.8. > Interfacing with Apple Remotes Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm…

People would still expect USB/Firewire/etc optical media drives to work.

Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#189

Post by yardie »

CJefferson wrote: post #141
eddieplan9 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot see how this is bad for competition. Within the App Store, the apps are subject to the same restrictions and it is fair competition. Outside of the App Store, you are not subject to the restrictions, and hopefully you can - and you should - build something that is impossible to achieve under the App Store restrictions, and you get your competitive advantages. If you just hate the App Store idea, and you don'…

Except of course, the App Store gets dropped into the dock of every Mac bought. I wonder (and just thinking out loud here) if there might end up being an 'app store' anti-trust suite, with Apple and Microsoft being forced to give things like Steam prominence?

Every version of Windows back to 95 has included a link to the Microsoft Marketplace in the Start menu. I've never heard Valve or any other competitor complain about it.

Re: Why the Mac App Sandbox makes me sad

#190

Post by mike-cardwell »

mbq wrote: post #165
mike-cardwell wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That analogy bears no resemblance to the issue at hand. These changes improve security. Just because they don't improve the security to 100%, that doesn't make them worthless.

The main problem is that it comes with a obvious loss of functionality which I doubt that can be leveraged with security gain -- the other thing is that it gives a faux sense of security to the user (i.e. yes, I have agreed for full file system access, but it was sandboxed, right?). Finally, the system is as weak as the weakest elements, and those seemingly lay in their own code (and can be fixed without hurting the…

So if Google decided to remove the sandboxing functionality in the next version of Android and just run every app under the same user id, that wouldn't reduce the security of Android devices?
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