Sandboxing Deadline Extended to June 1

News from Apple:

We have extended the deadline for sandboxing your apps on the Mac App Store from March 1st to June 1st to provide you with enough time to take advantage of new sandboxing entitlements available in OS X 10.7.3 and new APIs in Xcode 4.3.

If you’re interested in a deep, thoughtful take on the problems Mac developers are running into with sandboxing, Daniel Jalkut wrote a good piece last week. For some concrete problems encountered in a sandbox-enabled app as things stand today, see Craig Hockenberry’s brief piece on xScope 3.0, and Manton Reece on his decision to pull Clipstart from the Mac App Store.

If they had asked my advice, I’d have suggested postponing mandatory sandboxing until Mountain Lion is released. The problem here isn’t really about app developers needing more time to update their apps; it’s about Apple needing more time to improve the sandboxing rules and APIs.

★ Tuesday, 21 February 2012