Between a rock and a hard place – our decision to abandon the Mac App Store(blogs.atlassian.com) |
Between a rock and a hard place – our decision to abandon the Mac App Store(blogs.atlassian.com) |
Now, say a game or web browser that runs potentially malicious content, sure, sandbox it. But other things like code interpreters, low level Unix tools, or inter process tools like AppleScript, they're still open to (mis)use by anyone.
I'm going to guess that most malware for OS X will soon become non-compiled scripts. Sure, the interpreter would be signed, but what it runs is totally arbitrary.
I'm a user of one of Apple's "pro" applications, Logic Pro 9, a top music recording software (or DAW). I started using it long before it was put in the appstore, and was surprised when they moved it there, as it was a 5 DVD install.
Anyways ... the tool interacts with plugins written in a Logic Pro independent standard, VST. It burns CDs. It manipulates midi through wifi, usb, and firewire. It reads third party provided sound samples and loops. It manipulates analog instrument interfaces through firewire ...
Is Apple going to cripple Logic Studio? Or will they also have to take their "pro" software out of the appstore?
Unfortunately, it appears this may be a "do as I say, not as I do" situation.
The answer is simple, Apple's apps will have special access that will make them better than 3rd party apps which have to jump through all these hoops.
Actually, Logic Pro does not interact with VST plugins at all. It interacts with AU (Audio Unit) plugins. Plugins like Native Instrument's etc that come as VST plugins also come in AU versions.
Is Apple going to cripple Logic Studio?
No, Apple is not going to cripple Logic Studio. They even said so, a few months ago.
Or will they also have to take their "pro" software out of the appstore?
They can also do whatever they want with THEIR apps in the appstore, like have them there despite not implementing sanboxing, or giving them arbitrary sanboxing rights (after all, Apple TRUSTS their own apps not to be malware).
In theory, all the games and apps have to sign/encrypt/check everything they load. But I can't believe they will all implement this correctly or that Apple will find all the subtle bugs when reviewing.
The only way to parlay that into control of the system would be to break the sandbox. And then, because OS X default security is fairly sane, the only way to do real lasting damage is to use a further exploit to escalate your permissions.
Splinter Cell and MechAssault where famous for this. The bug is actually in the XBox Dashboard code itself, so the Host system was buggy.
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Starting in Mac OS X v10.6, the NSURL class and the CFURLRef opaque type each provide a facility for creating and using bookmark objects. A bookmark provides a persistent reference to a file-system resource. When you resolve a bookmark, you obtain a URL to the resource’s current location. A bookmark’s association with a file-system resource (typically a file or folder) usually continues to work if the user moves or renames the resource, or if the user relaunches your app or restarts the system.
In an app that adopts App Sandbox, you must use a security-scoped bookmark to gain persistent access to a file-system resource.
Security-scoped bookmarks, available starting in Mac OS X v10.7.3, support two use cases:
• An app-scoped bookmark provides a specific sandboxed app with persistent access to a user-specified file or folder.
For example, if your app employs a download or processing folder, present an NSOpenPanel dialog to obtain the user’s intent to use a specific folder. Then, by creating a security-scoped bookmark for that folder and storing it as part of the app’s configuration (perhaps in a property list file or using the NSUserDefaults class), your app acquires a means to obtain future access to the folder.
• A document-scoped bookmark provides a specific document with persistent access to a file.
For example, a code editor typically supports the notion of a project document that refers to other files and needs persistent access to those files. Other examples are an image browser or editor that maintains an image library, in which the library file needs persistent access to the images it owns; or a word processor that supports embedded images, multimedia, or font files in its document format. In these cases, you configure the document format (of the project file, library file, word processing document, and so on) to store security-scoped bookmarks to the files a document refers to. (A document-scoped bookmark can point only to a file, not a folder.)
A document-scoped bookmark can be resolved by any app that has access to the bookmark data itself and to the document that owns the bookmark. The document can be a flat file, or a document distributed as a bundle.
--------------------------------
For the duration of the company's existence, one of their biggest customer segments has been the creative industry. I can't think of a single pro audio/video/graphic/etc app that doesn't make extensive use of plug-ins, another Mac App Store disqualifier.
Do the developers of these apps necessarily have a "right" to iCloud APIs, delta updates, and other benefits of playing in Apple's sandbox? Of course not.
But is Apple harming themselves and their customers by excluding the creators of these apps from the party and potentially causing them to focus their development efforts elsewhere? I think they may be.
Um, no. If there's one thing that's more private than my address book, it's my ssh keys. The fact that they aren't available to your application by default is a feature. If you need a key, ask me for it. If I want to give you the access, I'll do that.
There are other tools that do similar in other OS's, for example the "keychain" script in Debian. This isn't something weird IMO.
Very very popular apps like:
Chrome
Photoshop/Adobe CS
Fusion/Parallels
Microsoft Office
Text Editors
FTP Clients
Dropbox
The Mac App Store loses a bit of its allure when you get your new MacBook Air [even as a non developer] and can't find basics like Chrome or Dropbox or Microsoft Office in there.
2. As of iOS 5, the platform has native Audio Unit support. I haven't seen much use of it, more commonly devs have been porting their work to JUCE (as in the case of the Auria iPad DAW, which features some popular third party plug-ins as in-app purchases).
I don't understand: What prevents an app from having an "Add Plugin..." dialog that uses the sandboxed file browser to locate a plugin library in whatever sensible format?
I wonder if Apple might give some companies of just distributing the installer via the app store as well.
1: future anti-trust cases or congressional testimonies nonwithstanding
Sure, iDevice developers have no choice. But for desktop software there's this handy thing called the Internet. Why kick up revenue to apple, subject myself to submission rules and arbitrary rejection, absurd technical limitations and switcheroos like the one described in this article, and all the rest?
Right, there are no success stories.
"Why kick up revenue to apple"
People keep saying this like Apple doesn't deliver buying customers and revenue. The app store making a profit on sales is exactly how every other store in the world works. Why does Apple 'kick up revenue' to Amazon when they could just sell all their iPads online through Apple.com? The answer is because lots of people shop at Amazon and Apple will sell way more iPads with Amazon then without them.
Example: The Keychain application from Apple (used to store certificates, private keys and passwords) is using a encryption algorithm that is too weak for what it is used - namely: DES. You can break it with a reasonable amount of money.
Wouldn't it make more sense to improve these kind of things first? We would gain so much more security with a minimal effort.
"All the password data in the keychain is protected using the
Triple Digital Encryption Standard (3DES)."
"NIST considers keying option 1 to be appropriate through 2030."
Source? This is relevant to my interests. Namely, I'm trying to figure out if using something like 1password or other services would be worth it. Thanks!
I don't know what the best solution is. Possibly allowing non-sandboxed apps in the app store, which go under extra review (possibly with a premium charge to defray the cost of extra review), or requiring the user to select a 'do not sandbox this' option when installing the app.
However, Apple can't give this app what it wants while keeping the integrity of their sandbox.
The goal is to create the most secure running environment that is possible. Allowing random apps to access/modify different files on the system (without user explicitly allowing that) kinda defeats the purpose of sandboxing (from user's point of view - from developers POV, sandboxing makes his app more secure and stable).
All I see is people ranting about sandboxing's limitations, without coming up with actual plans to improve it.
Is that a bad thing? I'm not saying it will happen soon, or that those of us long in the tooth will go easily, but I honestly think it's the future.
Think about young teenagers who will soon be "in charge". They snap a pic on their phone and send it to someone else. Nobody cares where it is in the filesystem, or even what the filename is. I used to meticulously name, tag and organize my mp3 collection into folders and sub-folders. Now I don't even know where they are on my hard drive - because I just don't care.
Those are old concepts we used to rely on to find and use information stored inside the computer, but I honestly don't see the need for the in the future. We can stop focusing on the "how" of the computer, and focus on the doing.
I will add that "power" users like developers will require these kind of concepts for a lot longer than your average Joe, but I still see it becoming less and less important.
I think now might be the time for a rival App Store to set up shop before Apple locks developers into only releasing through their approval process.
Maybe I'm over reacting, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
So basically, it's notable that some applications are having difficulty with the first iteration of these new restrictions, but it's not surprising and I'm confident the issues will be resolved in time. Meanwhile, we've all survived without the App Store for a long time. I think these applications can survive. This is not the time for outrage.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/16/os-x-mountain-lion/ (scroll down to Gatekeeper)
Here's hoping that 10.9 doesn't disallow such installations at all (or void your warranty instead?).
So while you can abandon the App Store without penalty, you shouldn't stop paying Apple the $99 a year you need to do so to get the app signed, even if you aren't going to sandbox it or distribute it through the MAS. They just want the option of pulling a cert for a dev found to be distributing malware, not to personally review and reject every application that runs in OS X.
"Click the button below, locate file xyz and 'Open' it to proceed"
I would be perfectly ok with a system "Grant permission to xyz" dialog, but the open file dialog is a terrible way of requiring access to a file or folder.
Rather than presenting it as some pointless mechanical chore in which you direct a user to a specific file in a known place, wouldn't "Choose where you would like Foo.app to save your XYZ (project/file/whatever)" make a lot more sense?
I would have thought the Final Cut Pro X debacle (http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/professional-video...) would have served adequate notice to those folks that Apple doesn't consider them an important market segment anymore...
I don't know if you have used/use Final Cut 6/7, but it is a phenomenally ugly, often poor performing, generally unintuitive piece of software. I can see where the motivation for a full reboot would stem from.
Now, a reboot that involves consolidating formerly modular panes into a single window when the target market typically works on two, three or more displays is just dumb. A reboot that was, as a practical matter, 0% backwards-compatible may have been necessary, but if it could have been avoided, it should have been. But buried under all the mistakes, I think there was some genuine good intent (yes, I know I'm grasping at straws).
I primarily work with music, and you don't need to be as involved as I am or attend as many shows as I do to know that for any artist/band that uses a laptop on stage, the MacBook Pro is the de facto standard. The same applies to Mac Pros in studios (although those boxes may be going the way of the Dodo as well).
None of this necessarily makes a difference to Apple; the new features in Mountain Lion which focus on Chinese web portals and social networks serve as a reminder that the emerging Chinese middle class is likely as important a segment to Apple as any, and the number of potential customers in that group already dwarfs the ranks of every DJ, producer, sound engineer, and electronic musician on earth.
Still, it would be a great disappointment to me and many others if Apple were to abandon such a loyal group of customers who helped them reach this point.
Unlike, say, Adobe, that merely piles incremental bloat upon incremental bloat, and calls it a "new version of the suite".
The complains are from people that:
1) see a black interface as some kind of iMovie-fication (iMovie is black, so they have dumded down FCP).
2) Think professional software means convoluted GUI (they made things simpler, so they have dumbed it down)
3) Expect a rewrite of a 10+ year old codebase to have feature parity with the old version from day one.
4) Expect a rewrite of a 10+ year old codebase, with the intention to support modern movie making practices, to also cater for obsolete practices that the old version covered (like tape editing).
I guess I should step back a bit and make my argument more clear. I'm not opposed to the concept of sandboxing, I recognize the benefits of these policies as Apple's user base grows and malware becomes a greater concern.
My contention is that the imposition this places on users and developers alike will most likely dissuade pro media software developers from participating in the Mac App Store to begin with, thereby depriving Apple of potential income, depriving developers access to useful features like iCloud file sharing/mirroring, and exposing users to the very risks this policy is intended to shield them from.
They're just disallowed from supporting plugins in the manner that they have been on every platform for 20 or 30 years.
I can testify about that. I just bought MBA recently and opened up App Store out of curiosity, however almost all of software I needed I bought at writer's store (apparently there is final draft now in app store, but I bought directly from Final Draft). Same goes for Office, Chrome, Dropbox, etc...
> Chrome
"Safari."
> Photoshop/Adobe CS
"Creatives? Did you see what we did to Final Cut? Have you noticed how little we talk about the Mac Pro anymore?"
> Fusion/Parallels
> Text Editors
> FTP Clients
"We're in the consumer products business, not the 'tools for nerds' business. Ask an XServe customer if you want more information."
> Microsoft Office
"We could care less if we sell boring-ass business software into enterprises."
> Dropbox
"iCloud."
As someone who has lived through a protracted antitrust review (Google acquiring ITA Software, a company I co-founded), I can tell you that there are dozens of hard-working people at the DOJ and FTC ready to make their careers on taking Apple down should Apple give them the tools to do so. A "some animals are more equal than others" app store policy -- whether intended or unintended -- is definitely fodder for a juicy DOJ/FTC lawsuit.
That gives a photo editor, a movie editor, spreadsheet, and word processor.
What DID they do to Final Cut? They spend tons of money and engineering time to rewrite the app from scratch with a modern codebase and added new innovative features. The got it to 64bit, they added the magnetic timeline (HUGE timesaver), the improved tons of workflow stuff, they made it take advantage of multiple cores, and they made it work with files in whatever format they are in to begin with.
In the process, as with any version 1.0 app, FPCX lost a few of the features that the old, bloated, version of FCP had. Some because you just cannot just scratch from scratch and replicate absolutely everything at once, and others because they don't make much sense moving forward. Some of those features, like multicam editing, they delivered in subsequent minor versions (of which there have been 3 already).
That is much more than what Adobe does, which is incrementally adding a few features, without ever rethinking their apps, and keeps adding bloat upon bloat (Flash based custom panels, anyone?) to the same 10 or 20 year old codebase. Apple betted on the future, Adobe plays it safe.
So, I beg to differ in respect to FCP X.
Have you noticed how little we talk about the Mac Pro anymore?"
And why should they? A quad core iMac is just as capable for the needs of 90% of creatives, and in fact, if you looked at any design studio in the past 2-3 years you were more likely to find one of those than a Mac Pro or a G5.
They also know that they sell a very small amount of those Pro machines, and it's not like Intel is making new chips for them all the time.
Besides, Thunderbird, the Apple/Intel interconnect perfectly suited for professionals and creatives that no other PC vendor took the time and effort to create, solves most of the connectivity issues that an iMac (or even a MacBook Pro laptop) had related to a Mac Pro.
If you find it so objectionable, go build your own hardware and OS platform. This isn't a matter of human rights because no one is telling you that you can't make your own.
It's very similar to their support for "multitasking" on iOS. Handle the common cases well, most others will find some way to make it work, and the rest are out of luck.
It's also important to note that the point of black hat hackers is to get around limitations. Without putting serious teeth into the sandboxing, it's largely pointless and security theater.
Also, I guess it depends on what the app does and what you mean by "real lasting damage".
[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2012/01/31/apple-updates-final-cut-pro-x... [2] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/final-cut-pro/id424389933?mt=...
iWork is a much better and more user-friendly set of software than MS Office (unless you're an Excel power-user, in which case the OS X version of Excel probably isn't cutting it for you either), but it's tough to recommend it for non-technical people who need to work with Windows folk.
That part is done. The application shouldn't be asking for SSH keys, it is completed already. Just use `ssh` as you would before.
"If the app store can truly compete with an open marketplace"
As it turns out there is an open market for iOS apps and an open alternative to iOS and Apple's walled garden is competitive with both.
"why won't apple let me install arbitrary software on my iDevice?"
Aren't the reasons obvious? Simplicity, profit, security?
You might as well be asking why your Macy's card doesn't work at Sears or why you can't make a copy of your building key at Sears or why.. hey just what does Sears have against freedom anyway?
First, what is this open market for iOS apps you mentioned? I haven't heard of it.
Of course Apple locks down the app store on their iDevices for profit. I think we're in agreement on that. If they didn't limit software delivery in that way, their app store would have to compete with other software delivery channels including the open web.
What I'm trying to express is my surprise that developers in the desktop world would opt in to a market like this. I had assumed that iDevice developers only used the app store because they had no choice.
I doubt that Apple is solely concerned with profit and even if they were I guess I don't see that as the end of the world.
If Apple is solely concerned with profiting from apps why do they subsidize free ones and credit card fees? {If dev share is actually calculated post cc fees I'll plead ignorance and move on to the other part of the argument.}
99 cent app less 69 cents to developer less 40-70 cents to credit card company less bandwidth fees = loss.
(I've given a range on cc fees because they are shared if you purchase multiple apps within a few days, that mitigates the loss but ultimately someone motivated only by profit would be taking easily avoided losses all over the place in either scenario.)
Isn't it well known that Apple's direct profit on the App Store is a rounding error compared to their other business?
Isn't it then more likely then that their motivation is not primarily to directly profit from it?
While I do think Apple is interested in profit here, I very deliberately listed it as secondary to simplicity which is really at the heart of everything Apple does well. There's a book coming out soon about just this:
http://kensegall.com/blog/2012/02/and-now-a-different-kind-o...
The premise I'm building on is that Apple really profits by making great products that just work and make people happy. Having a super simple way to get apps is part of that.
For 98%+ of users 1 app store >> 2 app stores >> 10 app stores. One App Store just works. It also stops most malware without any action by the user. That's simplicity again.
"What I'm trying to express is my surprise that developers in the desktop world would opt in to a market like this"
I guess again I'll fall back on my Sears comparison. I don't know if Sears still sells software but they did for decades -- Wal-Mart still does for sure though and there's no way Wal-Mart is any more dev friendly then Apple. Way harder to get your product on the shelves at, harder to keep your product there, takes at least as large a cut, etc.
What Wal-Mart does have is tens of millions of customers though. Apple too. So of course devs are going to opt into those markets.
The whole point of sandboxing is to reduce the damage a badly written or mal-intended application can do to a system.
Surely Apple TRUSTS their own apps.
It's unfortunate for users, rational beings who, having spent several hundred/thousand dollars on pro applications, can generally expect not to be served malware. I don't really need Apple's assistance to ensure that Ableton doesn't sell me a trojan. If they do, I have my lawyer's number in my phone, we know who to sue, we've got it covered. It's unfortunate that the way the rules are currently written, no pro media application will be able to take advantage of iCloud functionality…except of course the ones that Apple sells.
I don't care who Apple trusts. And if the answer to "Who does Apple trust?" is "No one but Apple," that says more negative things about Apple than it does about the tens of thousands of software developers, large and small, who aren't Apple.
You might be dense. Who said it's only for trojans? I wrote "to reduce the damage a badly written or mal-intended application can do to a system".
Sandboxing is not only about malware. If, for example, Live has a bug that eats your home directory, it won't have its day under sandboxing.
And who said anything different will happen to Live or anything? It's not in the App Store, and you will STILL be able to run it. The change is for App Store applications.
Wholesale changes in OS or environment runtime? Changes in underlying processor architecture? Forced update to full 64-bit support? Customers wanting to operate on files that are an order of magnitude larger?
If these apps have any claim to being worth hundreds or thousands of dollars per seat, and charging hundreds of dollars for basic compatibility updates, their developers should Pro-up and deal with this change like they've dealt with others.
And given the motivation for the change, I think they should skip the complaining step and lean into the work.
Having said that, I've had far too many conversations with far too many professional filmmakers and editors (I'm talking "multiple all-nighters every week editing multicam RED; invitations to Cannes; contracts to produce music videos for multi-platinum selling artists and promos for Fortune 100 companies" professional) about the weaknesses of Final Cut X to have much regard for the opinion you've shared here.
Ultimately, if the intended users are dissatisfied, then Apple missed the mark, any rationalizations from armchair analysts notwithstanding.
By the way, you left a complaint off your list: Zero compatibility with project files from previous Final Cut versions. Hope you've got some free time to recapture everything you've ever shot.
Not really. System 9 Users also complained about OS X 10. How it wasn't like OS 9, how it missed some features, how it was unstable etc. But putting a nice foundation down is better than giving instant gratification to your users in the long run.
By the way, you left a complaint off your list: Zero compatibility with project files from previous Final Cut versions. Hope you've got some free time to recapture everything you've ever shot.
Or just use the old version for your old projects, and only move to the new one for new stuff?
What kind of Pro jumps to a new version of a core tool anyway as soon as it it released? Most actuals Pros keep their setups steady for many years. Which is why I think most of the noise is from low production tinkerers, that already use both FC and Premiere etc.
As a practical matter, it would require anything up to and including a full rewrite of every pro media creation app on the market. The standard to date has been that there is a specified folder for plug-ins, and the host scans the folder for installed plug-ins on startup.
One benefit of this arrangement is that the user must install the plug-in only once to have access to it in any application that supports its plug-in format. Let's use pro audio apps as an example. I use Ableton Live and Native Instruments Maschine as my primary compositional tools, but I prefer to mix/master in Reaper. Given your alternative method, when I purchased Madrona Labs' Aalto, one of my favorite virtual instruments released in recent memory, I would have needed to endure three separate installation processes to have access to the plug-in in each app where I might want to use it.
Additionally, Maschine happens to have the ability to run both as a standalone application and as a VST plug-in. Let's say I sketched out a beat in Maschine standalone, using Aalto to produce some cool Buchla bongo sounds. Later, in Live, I insert an instance of the Maschine VST and open my project file for further processing. Do I now have nested sandboxes? Will it work at all?
Things get even more complicated when one considers the plug-in developers who require iLoks (license verification USB dongles). These seem even less likely to be compatible with Apple's new processes. Don't get me wrong, I hate and refuse to use iLoks, and by extension any software which requires them. But many Pro Tools/Waves/Soundtoys/etc users are just used to the inconvenience of a hardware dongle at this point, and the companies I mentioned have many satisfied customers.
It seems to me more likely that rather than rewriting their apps or fundamentally adjusting their license verification practices, many of these developers will simply avoid the App Store altogether. As a consequence, users suffer.
Sorry I can't point to individual forum threads at the moment.
Despite my surprise that anybody would use it, there are over a thousand apps on the mac app store, so apple must be adding value by getting the product in front of eyeballs and streamlining the payment process. Still, I don't think they'll be able to get away with the draconian rule that they enjoy in the iDevice world. After all, if they make the experience too unpleasant, developers can still sell software through a competing app store, their website, or by mailing you a CD-ROM if all else fails. I think this is a good thing - the "escape hatch" means they'll actually have to put effort into pleasing the vendors who use their channel.
You'll never see a "why we decided to abandon the iPhone app store" - the only choice in that world is to abandon the platform altogether.
Apple's money comes from selling a cohesive experience. That, on iOS, that's been helped by a "walled garden" approach does not indicate that the same approach will make OS X better. Some people have been crying wolf since iOS 1.0 about the demise of the open Mac platform. They were wrong about Snow Leopard, they were wrong about Lion, and they're wrong about Mountain Lion. It's beginning to sound like a certain boy and a certain wolf.
It's clear that Apple is making OS X more and more and more like iOS. I think you're right the loud-mouth "DOOM" scare posts are a bit silly and I hope I'm not coming across that way. I just think that people are accepting this when they wouldn't have imagined OS X looking like it will soon with Mountain Lion a year or two.
Sigh, if you're going to downvote, please have the courtesy of telling me what was so inflammatory about my post. Especially if you're going to drive by downvote all of mine in a particular portion of the thread. I mean, good god, this post is simply a listing of observations and then an agreement with the parent that many people draw absurd conclusions.
Actually, nothing of the kind ever happened. Maybe some idiots did, but security experts have been nagging Apple to add signed apps all the time (Windows had them for ages), and people were also interested in a Mac App Store (not to mention developers, who saw it as another gold rush after the successful iPhone App Store).
Besides, from the very first OS X, say, 10.0.1 to 10.8, nothing has been taken away from user freedom. What exactly can't you do in 10.8 that you could in 10.0.1? They only ADDED stuff, i.e not you can also get stuff from the App Store, and in 10.8 you can also run secure, signed, apps.
Plus, why wouldn't OS X have a "walled garden"? Linux distros had one for ages, we call 'em "package repositories". Yeah, you can install stuff in other ways too in a Linux distro, but then again, so you can on OS X 10.8.
Imagine for instance an application that helps you clean up your downloads folder, but wouldn't be appropriate to use on other folders on your system. It's not the best example, but it illustrates how much of a usability mess it is to ask the user to locate the folder for you through an open file dialog, and then have to reject it if they select the wrong thing.
I can see how there are very specific cases in which it would be too cumbersome, but it probably works in > 80% of cases, and it's pretty clear that those 80% apps are who the App Store is aimed at.
Edit: Thinking about this some more: not to pick on your example, but the Downloads folder actually does need to be located by the user, because it's not actually in a fixed location (it defaults to $HOME/Downloads, but that's not where mine is located, for instance).
There really aren't many cases that I can dream up in which you can absolutely be certain of a file or folder's location, such that an Open Dialog is totally superfluous.
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2799.en.h...
The RDF is on full effect there, I see. You might want to look at systems like the Xerox Alto & Star, both released before the Lisa. The implementation was certainly excellent - and I have a lot of respect for the Lisa and Macintosh engineers - but many of the concepts were invented elsewhere.
So... Apple generally gets kudos for 'giving users what they want', but users are not allowed to say what they want?
Nice work.
You're comparing Apple's ecosystem to Earth's.
Apple is a private company that makes products that are sold on the commercial markets. The Earth is something entirely different. If Apple made planets, then yes – they could decide how to manage the atmosphere. That's how business works.
It's a cool-off period.
Files are more popular and profitable than ever. You have companies like Dropbox and Box.net making serious money. Yes, I can see that we may one day not need to expose the concept of filesystems to an end user but I think it will be a very very long time (like generations) unless there is some revolutionary new computing concept besides the ones we have today.
[1] http://googlesystem.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/how-google-docs-... [2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/9071936/Google-...
If tags are a way that you can definitely find and specify a given file, then tags will form part of a new, distributed file system. If tags wind-up just being half-assed, uncertain hints to where files might be, then they will form part of a new, disfunctional distributed file system. And the later case seems to be where things are going. This "hints but no certainty" approach to file location indeed works great most of the time and fails frustratingly significant percent of the time.
But even here, this is a file system even when it is often dysfunctional.
I have thousands of photos "in" iPhoto, and I have no idea of any of the file names or their location on the file system.
I don't care what they are called or where they are, I just want to have my photos.
Sure, there might be a filesystem under there, but I have no interest in interacting with it directly.
Even a flickin' unix whiz doesn't care about, say, which disk sector a file is located on. In fact, if they are using a distributed file system, they also can mostly ignore the physical location of the data.
Your spiffy net of tags is a way-to-find data. A officially "file system" is a way to find data. Each has some flexibility, some lack-of-ambiguity and some persistence over time. You may not care about the uniqueness, ambiguity and decay over time of your tag based way-to-find data. But that just means you've got a convenient but half-assed file system. Moreover,
I saw that iCloud file storage will support folders like the iPhone home screen, but I have no idea if they will support nested folders. This isn't only the case with nerds and geeks. My mother, about as computer phobic as they come, is a minister, and she saves all her sermons for future reuse. They are categorized by specific topic using folders. Also related documents from different applications can use folders to be organized together.
There are a lot of features of filesystems that we take for granted, abstracting it away without providing a usable alternative is problematic.
Do they currently go on to careers managing folder hierarchies?
Some of those teenagers will go on to be CEO's and Execs at huge fortune 500 companies like Apple, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.
Exactly. No human will do this, computers will do for us in an automatic way, using search and programming.
We will ask the computer:
"Show me my 2004 photos in chronological order, and the computer will do."
What is the problem?
It is a very bad thing. I agree that it looks like this is where the industry is going, and I really, really, really dislike this direction.
Files are an incredibly useful abstraction. Sure, there are programs that work with photos and songs, but thee's a whole class of applications that works with "data" no matter what this data is. Think of stuff like backups, synchronization, compression, encryption, etc. If somebody comes up with a new encryption algorithm, filesystem lets me instantly use it for all my data regardless of which application I used to create it. But we're heading towards the world where we need one program to backup photos and another one to backup songs, and only OS manufacturers are allowed to create utilities that work with all my data in general. This is not good for innovation.
I agree with you. The "Files" abstraction has served us very well for more than 30 years. That's not justification to not attempt to find a better way.
Yeah, isn't it much better?
App persisting (both in memory and) state.
Yay, a modern operating system practice finally in OS X. The OS should take advantage of what it can do, to balance apps loading faster and using less resources. For all I care, the ideal would be all apps to be always INSTANT ON.
Not showing hidden files in Finder.
Hidden files shouldn't be an end user's concern.
More iCloud integration at seemingly every turn in Mountain Lion.
Yeah, finally. We don't live with ONE computer anymore, we have several, plus several devices. We want them synced. We want them to backup online. We want a modern Cloud service from Apple.
I feel like you're completely and intentionally ignoring the point I'm trying to make.
I also disagree that extensibility is in conflict with sandboxing. As for pro media software developers, I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of time and polishing of the platform. AutoCad LT is already in.
Many popular audio plugins are themselves plugin hosts (just off the top of my head, Native Instruments' Reaktor, Maschine, and Guitar Rig and Five12 Numerology match that description). In this context, wouldn't that require nested sandboxes? You're sure you don't see any potential conflicts there?
Yes. Is that hard to grasp? Sanboxing is safer than the old distribution practice. You won't find any security expert to disagree with this.
Thus, every pro media application distributed without sandboxing was LESS safely distributed than a sandboxed one.
I don't want to see them fuck it up.
Now:
>Thus, every pro media application distributed without sandboxing was LESS safely distributed than a sandboxed one.
First, they weren't less safely distributed, they were less safely executed. Nothing gets sandboxed until after it's been distributed. The only reason we're discussing both issues here is that Apple has elected to conflate the two with their MAS policies.
I'm only 25, and yet I've installed thousands of pieces of software during my brief time on this planet. Very few of them wreaked havok on my life, so you'll have to forgive me if I remain unconvinced that every single application I run must be sandboxed to maintain the stability and integrity of my system.
My contention is not that sandboxing, generally speaking, is bad for users. It isn't.
My contention is that sandboxing, as Apple has narrowly defined it, is impossible to implement in a large segment of professional applications as they are currently written.
Furthermore, if developers choose to eschew the MAS, users of their applications will be deprived access to useful new tools like iCloud file sharing for reasons that seem arbitrary at best.
Finally, in two weeks time when Apple begins to enforce regulations which will exclude these applications from MAS distribution, but does not remove VST/AU support from Logic Pro, Rewire support from Mainstage, or [insert your favorite hypocrisy here], they may be acting anticompetitively, which is bad news.
Well, it's a pedantic distinction if sanboxing occurs before or after. Since, sure, sanboxing rules are applied at runtime, but sanboxing is also built into the app before distribution (the developers adds the certs, the "ask for permission" bits, etc).
I'm only 25, and yet I've installed thousands of pieces of software during my brief time on this planet. Very few of them wreaked havok on my life, so you'll have to forgive me if I remain unconvinced that every single application I run must be sandboxed to maintain the stability and integrity of my system.
Well, in Windows lots of apps have wrecked havoc with my system. Malware, spyware, what have you. I've hand around 10 instances of my machine being infected in around 8 years of using a Windows machine. In OS X, on the other hand, nothing yet. And sandboxing is a way to ensure it won't be so in the future.
But there's is also another issue for which I think sandboxing is nice, besides malware. It keeps apps from spiting stuff all over the system. Like, how MS Office installs its shit everywhere it can, or how Abode Creative suite does. Same things for lots of small apps. If sandboxing can keep the confided in their own space, that will also be a win.
My contention is that sandboxing, as Apple has narrowly defined it, is impossible to implement in a large segment of professional applications as they are currently written.
Well, I think those rules can change. They already extended the period before sandboxing is applied. I'm sure as limitations are found we will see other changes too.
For some apps, on the other hand, like developer tools, rsync, git etc, they will always have to run without sandboxing.
Finally, in two weeks time when Apple begins to enforce regulations which will exclude these applications from MAS distribution, but does not remove VST/AU support from Logic Pro, Rewire support from Mainstage, or [insert your favorite hypocrisy here], they may be acting anticompetitively, which is bad news.
I'm not sure about the "anticompetitively" thing. It's their store, their rules. If sandboxing is about not trusting apps, then why would Apple require it for their own apps? One would think they trust them already.
Like I said, I don't think it's fair to imply that they will shut out non-AppStore apps or what not, but it's clear that OS X is becoming part of the LARGER Apple ecosystem in a way that I really don't feel like it was in Leopard or Snow Leopard.
I mean, they're ALL doing it as the app/branding craze comes full circle. Ubuntu is pushing the USC, Windows is pushing Live for login/user management, Apple is integrating iCloud at a very core level in OS X. I guess part of my surprise is from how quickly Apple has thrown iCloud together and integrated it compared to how long Windows has been scrambling with Live and Windows.
Normal users seem to be very comfortable with the idea of unspecified magic though.
To try and paint computer users as being in two camps 'normal' and 'developer' does everyone a disservice - there's much more variety in users than that. Here's an example - there's a lot of gamers that like side-editing save games, yet they're not developers. Where to they fit into your dichotomous view?
I think 'regular' users have plenty of use for understanding the filesystem. I also think that it's okay to have some degree of expectation for the user - dumbing it down for the lowest common denominator is harmful (look at politics!). What do you really gain by alienating the power users?
I see no reason why making the common case simple (not "dumb") means you have to eliminate, or even alienate, the power users. Frankly, since I started using a Mac, iTunes and an iPhone, I stopped managing music files. And I think that's great. Files are an implementation detail. What I want is music or radio programs, not files.
The idea that the 'normal' user is only a home-based casual web-browser/photo-taker/music listener is misleading from the outset.