Rush Limbaugh (via Nicolas Seriot):
And what he’s talking about being “restrictive,” is software developers with the new operating system for computers, for the Macs, Mountain Lion. You don’t get your app in the App Store unless it’s ”sandboxed,” which means… “Restrictive” is the word. The best way to explain it is that it can’t access the data in any other app and very little of the operating system itself.
[…]
Politically they have nothing in common with me, and your question is very valid. “Why in the world would you want to tout people that have no desire to do anything with you?” It’s just the stuff works. I think it’s state-of-the-art. I think it’s the best out there for what I need to do. Their stuff has facilitated my productivity like nothing else has.
As a long-time Mac user, he’s presumably been hearing questions like this since Apple was the “hippie” company rather than the “restrictive” company.
Mac Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Sandboxing
WriteUp now supports swipe selection gestures, like the ones from Daniel Hooper’s prototype video. This feature is currently iPad-only, but the developer hopes to get it working on the iPhone in a future version. There have been lots of other cool new features in recent updates to WriteUp. I hope to update my Comparing iPhone Text Editors post soon.
ThisService 3 is much-improved (via Jesper):
Normally, you have to write services using Apple’s Cocoa framework, using languages like C, C++ or Objective-C. With ThisService, anyone with a basic handle on programming can choose a language they’re comfortable with (like AppleScript, Perl, Python, Ruby or JavaScript (with node.js)) to write a service in. Many tasks suitable for services are easier to achieve with the right language for the task and you don’t have to figure out the service integration book-keeping.
Mac System Services
Nathan Grigg (via Dr. Drang):
Almost anything you can do with cron you can do with launchd, but with more power and flexibility. Unlike cron, launchd does not assume that your computer is always running. So if your computer happens to be sleeping at the time a job is scheduled, it will run the job when it wakes up. This is probably the best feature of launchd, because it allows me to run scripts on my iMac while still letting it sleep when I’m not using it.
I have pieced together what I know about using launchd to schedule jobs from tutorials across the internet, trial and error, and the manuals. This is my attempt to gather all my knowledge about this in one place.
Gina Smith:
Basically, the patent - narrowed from its originally overtly “obvious” claims as recorded by patent examiners - covers a method of displaying a social network user’s profile per his or her privacy settings, display them on screen and show what their profile looks like on-screen to various other users or groups of users.
Marco Arment:
I’ve lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated.
Neven Mrgan:
And the Mac App Store, in its current incarnation, just isn’t built for us. It’s built for people looking for casual apps and games. (Sorry, there’s one more category: Apple’s own apps, which don’t have to play by Apple’s rules.) And that’s also fine. But put the two facts together—the loss of casual users to iOS, and the loss of non-casual apps on the App Store—and it starts to look like a problem.
Sherman Dickman:
However, we eventually determined that the Mac App Store wasn’t the best fit for Postbox. We had already established our own online store and purchase policies prior to the Mac App Store release. Additionally, the Mac App Store was not evolving quickly enough, and in the direction we needed it to go, to support the Postbox 3 release in a manner consistent with Postbox Store policies.
SuperDuper 2.7 now updates the status while copying large files, amongst other improvements.
