Considering I had spent the last two months working on it and had already wrapped up the work on Together and Feeder on Oct 28, you might think I’d be pretty peeved, but I’m not, because sandboxing sucks.

I won’t be releasing sandboxed versions of Together or Feeder on the Mac App Store until it’s a requirement, because the apps will lose certain capabilities that I know people appreciate and to some extent define the usability of the app. Things you really take for granted, like the ability to store your files wherever you please. Poster isn’t too badly affected by sandboxing, mostly because it’s a fairly straightforward app, and I have already been forced to change certain things so it behaves as though it is sandboxed.

If you know how sandboxing works, it won’t take you long to work out that, in its current form, it is incompatible with some of Apple’s own apps on the Mac App Store, such as Final Cut Pro. Quite how Apple is going to resolve the situation is unknown.

For now, be aware that if you purchase apps from the Mac App Store — any app, not just my own — it is possible Apple can dream up new rules that could hobble the functionality of those apps in the name of security or anything else at any time, whether or not they ultimately choose to go ahead with sandboxing.

It’s my personal opinion that, while some of the ideas of sandboxing are good, others are just not worth the compromises, even sacrifices, that must be made, and the concept was not well thought through. I know I’m not alone in this view, so let’s hope Apple can take a more moderate approach that will work well for everyone.

Together

Together 2.5 has been built for Lion and is available for direct customers, but is still being reviewed by Apple for the Mac App Store. The current Mac App Store version, Together 2.4.5, runs on Lion, but there are some issues with automatically imported files, some performance issues and other minor glitches that will be fixed by version 2.5.

Feeder

All recent versions of Feeder will work on Lion and will automatically get overlay scrollers, but version 2.2.1 also supports Lion’s full-screen mode and that’s been available on this site for about a week and the Mac App Store since Tuesday. However, there is an issue with publishing to MobileMe and WebDAV servers that seems to be a problem with Lion that I have reported to Apple. The current workaround is to have Feeder publish to the iDisk or WebDAV disk on your Desktop instead.

Poster

All versions of Poster will work perfectly well on Mac OS X Lion. Version 1.1.3 includes support for full-screen mode and overlay scrollbars and is available both direct from this site since Tuesday and through the Mac App Store today.

Lion Changes

The focus of this version is to make Together work well on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion with full screen mode, overlay scrollbars, Quick Look previews for text attachments and the new find bar for search text within documents. If you were running Lion before its release, there are also many fixes and performance improvements specific to Lion.

New Requirements

One big change is that Together is now Intel-only and requires Mac OS X 10.6 and later. Apple is taking quite an aggressive approach to moving its developer tools forward to an Intel-only world and it was not possible to have Together both work on 10.5 and take advantage of the new features in 10.7.

Improvements

In addition to Lion-specific features, Together also adds some new features for 10.6 users, including Quick Look previews for text documents that are not RTF or plain text, such as Word documents, a text size preference for Quick Notes, cleaner looking tabs and group icon. Together has also been improved so that it now remembers the last viewed page in PDF documents, search results are updated when moving and removing items.

Finally, Together’s library file has changed into a file package containing both the library database and supporting files. While something of a technical change, this may affect backups and such. The change has been made necessary by the Mac App Store guidelines and forthcoming sandboxing feature of Lion. Together will migrate library files to the new version as they are opened.

Availability

Together 2.5 is a free upgrade for all paid Together 2.x users, the price remains unchanged at $39.95 and a 15-day trial is available for download from this site.

A full list of changes in this version is available in the release notes.

The reason, quite simply, is that Apple is transitioning their developer tools and has dropped PowerPC support from the new versions, which will make it impossible to both build apps for PowerPC and take advantage of the new features in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, out later this year.

Personally, while I can understand why Apple is doing this, I think the move is a tad premature. I would rather wait until such a time that I choose to drop support for Mac OS X 10.5, the last version of Mac OS X to run on PowerPC.

The final versions of the apps to run on PowerPC will always be available to download from this site.

You may notice that the Services menu has been cleaned up in Snow Leopard and this affects Together users. You can now choose which items to show and set shortcut keystrokes for the Services menu in System Preferences. Unlike the mess of before, Snow Leopard only shows the services that are relevant to the current selection.

An additional enhancement is that items in the Services menu now appear in contextual menus. This is intended to replace contextual menu plugins across the system, as those will not work with 64-bit applications.

Speaking of which, I plan to make both Feeder and Together 64-bit applications on their next major release (Feeder 2.1 and Together 2.3). Together will be released first and Feeder will follow. Feeder is much more reliant on a number of third-party components than Together, so that transition will take longer.

I plan to take advantage of more Snow Leopard technology in my apps in due course, while retaining Leopard compatibility for a while.

I’ve been using Snow Leopard for a while now and my favorite enhancement has got to be the improved Exposé, especially the way an app is put under the spotlight when dragging to its Dock icon. I think Snow Leopard is my favorite release of Mac OS X since 10.3 Panther. Big headline features are great, but a focus on thoughtful enhancements and improved performance always seems to make me smile.

So, if you’re installing it today, I’d like to wish you a happy Snow Leopard day!

Also in the comments of that post I noticed a link to a site called QLPlugins, which lists some of the Quick Look plug-ins released so far. That could turn into a very handy site.

Update: I also found found about another site, Quick Look Plugins List, which has some not on QLPlugins.

Back when Tiger was released, Apple had a section on their downloads pages for Spotlight generators, which is still there. I’m surprised they haven’t created one for Quick Look yet, as it works on exactly the same principle.

The other big change is that Feeder now requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. This has been the case anyway with the outstanding issue of compatability introduced by QuickTime 7.2, which Apple doesn’t seem in a hurry to fix. In order to make Feeder fully Leopard compatible, Panther had to go.

This was something I was planning to do anyway in the next major version as Panther support is holding Feeder back and my testing burden just doubled with the launch of Leopard. Panther usage is minimal these days, anyway.

So we need a fresh experience. What’s the criteria?

There are tens of millions of existing Mac users all over the world, and millions of new ones waiting in the wings. They need to an experience that is both brand new, and yet familiar. Stop short, and it will not spark the user’s interest. Go too far, and you may alienate your user base. So the task is finding the balance.

This is additionally complicated by the fact that Leopard must look like it belongs in the same universe as the iPhone, iPod, the Apple Store, and a wide range of Mac applications. It’s difficult (impossible?) to come up with something which satisfies all tastes, so compromises have to be made.

I think it’s a mistake, though, to assume that the shipping designs are ever reached via apathy for a particular audience. Finding the perfect balance is hard, but some version ultimately must ship to keep things moving forward. The goal, I think, is maximum user satisfaction for the target audience. This may mean making changes that some audiences would disagree with (because not everyone experiences things in the same way), but I really doubt it’s apathy.

However, rather than the subjective views to which he alludes throughout the post, much of the criticism about Leopard, voiced very consistently by developers and users alike, is that many of the changes actually degrade usability, making the user experience less satisfying.

Some examples:

• The new folder design makes it more difficult to recognise folders at a glance.
• The new Dock’s “lights” do a worse job at showing an app’s running status than the triangles in the previous versions of the Dock, by offering less contrast.
• Stack icons in the Dock make it more difficult to see which folder is represented.
• Stacks can only access a limited number of items in a folder before falling back to the Finder; the pop-up menu listing all items is gone.
• The menu bar is harder to read with some backgrounds.

You’ve read such a list a thousand times by now, I’m sure.

None of these things are so terrible that your Mac becomes unusable and overall Leopard looks good, but people expect better from Apple. The impression is that Leopard’s UI designers were unable to fuse form and function as well as we have come to expect. It’s both disappointment and frustration fuelling the complaints.

On the plus side, I would say Spaces, the unified window style, new Finder (undoubtedly my favourite change) and Spotlight results window are generally regarded as worthwhile improvements.

Taken as a whole, it appears more was lost than won with Leopard’s UI changes.

Scott ends with this:

If history can be used as a benchmark, the UI discussion cycle we’re currently in with Leopard is a natural part of the process. Any sort of change will bring disagreement from some users, but eventually it all settles down as people get used to it and various tweaks are made. That’s been my experience, anyway.

I would agree that some changes require an adjustment period and various issues will be addressed in time. Normally, this would happen in the next major version of the OS, but maybe we will see some changes sooner thanks to all the discussions going on.

Just about every review I’ve read says that Leopard is more evolution than revolution and is focused on the gloss, but Leopard must be the biggest release for developers that I can remember. Even apart from the headline features like Core Animation, Apple has added plenty that makes putting the basics of an application together so much easier and have addressed a slew of issues and unimplemented features that have been outstanding for years. This is great news for consistency and will help beginner and established developers alike.

I see Leopard as straddling two phases in the life of Mac OS X, marking the end of the first chapter and the start of a new one. When 10.0 was released, it wasn’t truly finished. 10.1 maybe achieved that but it wasn’t until 10.2 Jaguar that Mac OS X was truly usable. Panther was the first to really add more substance and Tiger was an obvious continuation of that.

Leopard doesn’t exactly launch us into the future, but we can get a glimpse. I think it’s the most refined release to date. Although I wish they had done better in some areas, they have at least put plenty of work into the substance of OS X and this is going to pay off handsomely in the long-term. Expect to see many great new apps and new versions of apps for Leopard.

Third Party Applications on the iPhone: “Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

Much sooner than I was expecting! I would have bet on WWDC 2008, which will probably be the iPhone WWDC now, unlike the last one, which was just pretending to be that (and failing miserably).

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. [...] Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer.

Technologies such as Leopard’s Code Signing would support this, which is a good sign (pun, sorry) as any developer can do this.

While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

It was always going to take Apple a while to create the tools for iPhone development and usually you get no word from Apple about something until it’s ready to be seen. Looks like with all the recent noise, Apple felt they had to make a statement. This goes a long way to removing worries that iPhone development will be restricted only to those whom Apple deems worthy. Should be interesting!

Between this and getting Leopard out on time (although no GM build to developers just yet, we’re stuck with the last buggy effort), Apple has made this Mac developer and user very happy. For now!