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Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

developer.apple.com

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Re: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

#21

Post by Groxx »

sipefree wrote: post #11
kennywinker wrote: post #9

It's time to write the eulogy for application automation and inter-application communication on the Mac. AppleScript (beast that it is) was innovative when it was created, and still has not been replaced. Automator is built on AppleEvents, and with sandboxing will come a sharp decline in the number of applications that can receive AppleEvents and the extinction of apps that send them.

Not at all! Sandboxing brings with it XPC, which is an IPC framework for doing very fast and awesome message passing. It's got some great features for separation of privileges. For instance, you might have an XPC sandboxed process for, say, rendering a H.264 video to a buffer. That process never gets access to the filesystem, the graphics card, or anything apart from the strip of memory that contains the file, and th…

/me tries the quicklook -> preview thing

That's kinda cool... never tried that before.

But yeah. Sandboxing does not at all imply not-scriptable. It tends to imply breakage with older systems of scripting, but that's about all, and only until wrappers are made.

Re: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

#22

Post by dman »

glassx wrote: post #19
cageface wrote: post #17

The real question is this: Is Apple going to eventually make the app store the only way of installing apps on a Mac? I think this is likely and if so is going to be the end of the line for me as an Apple customer.

Actually, the real question is: what would Apple gain from killing 90% of the app ecosystem? There are some apps that can't be really sandboxed (Little Snitch, virtualization tools), some apps you can't sell on the AppStore (video/audio/photoshop plugins) and there's even Apple apps that aren't available there yet (Logic, Filemaker, ). Also, Macs are the only way to write OS X and iOS apps, it would make the barrier…

A 30% cut of the remaining 10%.

Re: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

#23

Post by Groxx »

glassx wrote: post #19
cageface wrote: post #17

The real question is this: Is Apple going to eventually make the app store the only way of installing apps on a Mac? I think this is likely and if so is going to be the end of the line for me as an Apple customer.

Actually, the real question is: what would Apple gain from killing 90% of the app ecosystem? There are some apps that can't be really sandboxed (Little Snitch, virtualization tools), some apps you can't sell on the AppStore (video/audio/photoshop plugins) and there's even Apple apps that aren't available there yet (Logic, Filemaker, ). Also, Macs are the only way to write OS X and iOS apps, it would make the barrier…

Gain? 30% of all application sales, instead of 30% of 10%.

I don't think they'll lock it down to the app store either, but there are plenty of essentially-reasonable reasons why they could/would.

Re: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

#24

Post by extension »

cageface wrote: post #17

The real question is this: Is Apple going to eventually make the app store the only way of installing apps on a Mac? I think this is likely and if so is going to be the end of the line for me as an Apple customer.

Locking down OSX would be an epic technical and social battle. I can't think of any reason they would go to war with their power users just to do that, especially since they already have a curated platform. They probably just want to give novice users a safe, curated experience by default.

Re: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

#25

Post by glassx »

Groxx wrote: post #23
glassx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the real question is: what would Apple gain from killing 90% of the app ecosystem? There are some apps that can't be really sandboxed (Little Snitch, virtualization tools), some apps you can't sell on the AppStore (video/audio/photoshop plugins) and there's even Apple apps that aren't available there yet (Logic, Filemaker, ). Also, Macs are the only way to write OS X and iOS apps, it would make the barrier…

Gain? 30% of all application sales, instead of 30% of 10%. I don't think they'll lock it down to the app store either, but there are plenty of essentially-reasonable reasons why they could/would.

Except they repeatedly said they're just above cut-even on the iOS AppStore. It's strongly doubtful that they'd do something like that purely for financial reasons.

I don't think they are that dumb, of course they know they would lose customers like us.

Re: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

#26

Post by jayfuerstenberg »

lukifer wrote: post #18
cageface wrote: post #17

The real question is this: Is Apple going to eventually make the app store the only way of installing apps on a Mac? I think this is likely and if so is going to be the end of the line for me as an Apple customer.

I draw the line here too. I accept the control tradeoff on iOS because I view them as appliances, not computers, and there are upsides to the curated experience. But if I can't fully control my primary computing device, I'm out. (I'd be okay with the machine shipping in "grandma mode", so long as there's an official way to disable it completely.)

Your opinion is valid. There is one way to disable it as these rules still only apply to apps sold via the MAS.

Anybody can release software outside of it and just forget about Apple's rules.

Re: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

#27

Post by kennywinker »

Groxx wrote: post #21
sipefree wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all! Sandboxing brings with it XPC, which is an IPC framework for doing very fast and awesome message passing. It's got some great features for separation of privileges. For instance, you might have an XPC sandboxed process for, say, rendering a H.264 video to a buffer. That process never gets access to the filesystem, the graphics card, or anything apart from the strip of memory that contains the file, and th…

/me tries the quicklook -> preview thing That's kinda cool... never tried that before. But yeah. Sandboxing does not at all imply not-scriptable. It tends to imply breakage with older systems of scripting, but that's about all, and only until wrappers are made.

It doesn't imply it theoretically, but Apple hasn't pointed out a way that scripting is going to be a part of their ecosystem. Apple Events -are- going away. XPC doesn't work like that. What's left?

They could theoretically introduce a newer and better way to do this... Apple Events were far from... well far from usable actually in most cases... but I've seen amazing things built on them. The thought of easy public inter-application communication and automation going away makes me uneasy.

Imagine if Twitter, Facebook, or Google decided to kill all their APIs some time next year... This is like that on a more personal scale.

Re: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

#28

Post by kennywinker »

extension wrote: post #24
cageface wrote: post #17

The real question is this: Is Apple going to eventually make the app store the only way of installing apps on a Mac? I think this is likely and if so is going to be the end of the line for me as an Apple customer.

Locking down OSX would be an epic technical and social battle. I can't think of any reason they would go to war with their power users just to do that, especially since they already have a curated platform. They probably just want to give novice users a safe, curated experience by default.

I can absolutely see them doing this... and SOON. Give the MAS ecosystem a year, two at most, to mature.

There WILL be a switch somewhere, in the system prefs... a defaults write command... why? Because of Adobe, ProTools, Microsoft, and to a lesser extent stuff like homebrew and macports.

Re: Mac App Store apps must implement sandboxing as of March 2012

#29

Post by dgallagher »

This SO question raises an interesting issue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7419912/how-will-lions-ne...

What if your app uses Python to perform IO? What if you wrote your code using PyObjC? Is there any way to sandbox that, or are you out of the Mac App Store for good?

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