Apple Extends Deadline for Sandboxing of Mac App Store Apps to June 1

macrumors.com

15 points·natesm··5 comments

Ah, this lends credo to my strategy of ignoring Sandboxing in the hopes that it goes away.

10.7.3 introduced a few new entitlements, but the situation is still pretty dire for most apps. Sandboxing is not ready for prime time yet. As evidenced by the fact that almost all of Apple's own apps are still un-sandboxed.

What are these new entitlements and APIs, and how well do they address the concerns some developers had?

In short, 10.7.3 introduced "bookmarks". Basically your app can ask for permission to read/write to a file/folder, and keep that permission indefinitely. Prior to that, if you wanted to write somewhere on the disc (say the Downloads folder) you'd have to use the sandbox save dialog every time. Now you ask once for permission, and keep a bookmark of that permission.

There is also a document-scoped version of bookmarks. Not clear on the use case for that.

One use case would be something with "projects", like Xcode, that need to have project files with implicit access to the files around them. IIRC, it's currently limited to files (rather than directories), though, so I'm not sure how useful it really is.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa...

Security scoped bookmarks allow persistent access to a filesystem resource. That's the only one I'm aware of, but it's a major upgrade.

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