Sandboxing Deadline Arrives
Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software spoke to Macworld about his concerns regarding sandboxing last November too, rattling off a long list of features in the company’s popular text editor BBEdit that he feared might not be allowed going forward: multi-file search and replace; text factory applications; multi-application automation using AppleScript or Automator; Open File by Name; disk browsers; live folder views in projects; SCM integration; bulk HTML tools operations (syntax check, site update); and lots of behind-the-scenes stuff such as scanning directories for ctags data. Back then, Siegel said he literally wasn’t sure which features BBEdit would be able to continue to support once sandboxed. And now that sandboxing is here, Siegel still isn’t sure…
First, there’s what your app does. Then there’s the subset of features that one would expect to work based on Apple’s WWDC presentation of the sandbox design and intent last June. A subset of that are the features that Apple has actually implemented. And a subset of that are the ones that actually work in Mac OS X 10.7.4 (or the various 10.8 previews). Thus, as Siegel says, “there’s a lot of testing to do.”
On the one hand, it’s kind of a waste of time to do this testing. The longer you wait, the more OS bugs will be fixed. You could work on improving your app and sandbox it more easily later. On the other hand, in theory, if you find and report the bugs now they’ll be fixed sooner. If showstopper bugs aren’t fixed by the time your feature update is ready, you can’t ship it.
