Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Aerial Screensaver and Catalina

Guillaume Louel (via Tanner Bennett):

In macOS Catalina, 3rd party screensavers are now running in a sandboxed container which limits everything. As of right now there are no workarounds for many of the restrictions.

[…]

Aerial can only write in the legacyScreenSaver.appex sandbox container, which means in Catalina, JSON files and videos can only be downloaded in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine.legacyScreenSaver/Data/Library/Application Support/Aerial. Aerial can still read (only) the rest of your system disk so you can still store the videos in another folder after they are downloaded by manually setting the Cache. But Aerial cannot download videos to this cache.

[…]

Your cache may be wiped by the Catalina installer

[…]

[Because] a screen saver is not an app (we are a plugin run by legacyScreenSaver) we can’t ask for entitlements for, say, accessing filesystem.

[…]

Some (not all) of Apple screensavers are now bundled as an .appex too, with their own permissions. As far as I know that format is still not documented to this day nor available to 3rd parties.

Previously:

Update (2020-01-24): Dennis:

Yesterday I thought it would be a good idea to clean up my certificates under developer.apple. Turned out I broke everything since it broke the notarized binary. Guess I need to pay forever too support it.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

Not only the screensavers are buggy, also the wallpapers. Its really a bug or a new corporate directive? New franchise on horizon? Wee will need to pay in the future for using our Macs?
I installed my own wallpaper according to Apple instructions by dragging it to the top left window of Desktop & Screensavers and after 3 days was wiped out leaving a big ? in the window.
To copy a picture in the wallpapers folder is disabled in Catalina. WTF Apple? Why you don't allow me to customize MY Mac ?

Iain Henderson

Catalina is borked by entitlements. Network accounts can't have their homes on external disks. And I'm sure there a HUGE number of other potential issues just waiting to be discovered. Hopefully Santa Catalina (or whatever 10.16 is called) figures out this morass and provides a fix.

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