Macworld on Sandboxing
The Many Tricks team—Peter Maurer and former Macworld senior editor Rob Griffiths—is also concerned. “As of now, entitlements for the core features of many of our apps don’t even exist, which means we cannot make them compliant at all,” the developers said in an email interview. “In fact, these entitlements may never exist, as Apple appears to be in the process of redefining the fundamental concept of what third-party software is supposed to be capable of doing on the Mac.” Many Tricks says that several of its apps—Moom, Witch, and Time Sink—“rely on the Accessibility API and inter-application communication to do what they do, and these features will not be available to us” unless Apple modifies its restrictions. Right now, the developers expect they’ll need to pull all three apps from the store and rely on selling from their website instead.
It’s strange is how rushed this all is. The sandbox was announced at WWDC in June when Lion was already essentially done. So there wasn’t really time to make any fixes based on developer feedback before it shipped. It wasn’t until now that the sandbox requirement even appeared in writing on Apple’s developer Web site. Now the deadline has changed to March, which means that either Apple plans to introduce major changes in a 0.0.1 update or that they don’t plan to make many improvements before then. It’s the opposite of other major transitions: Carbon, Intel, 64-bit, etc. where the plan was announced well ahead of time and Apple was clearly eating its own dog food for a cycle or two in advance.
