On Apr 30, 2012, at 23:43, Dr. Adam M. Goldstein PhD MSLIS wrote:

> Hi all
> 
> I'm not totally clear on how Mountain Lion will make a difference to BibDesk. 
> Is the idea that everyone who wants to build an application has to register, 
> and then it only runs, or can be installed, if the developer ID is 
> registered? Or it just pops up a message telling the user that the app is not 
> registered? I haven't been able to (i.e., gave up after a while) looking for 
> information about this on the Apple developer info site. It sounds a little 
> creepy to me.
> 
> Adam

Some helpful public info is here (see the "You Control what you install." 
section):

http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/security.html

Regardless of how BibDesk is signed (or not) and the System Preference setting, 
users will always be able to install BibDesk by control-clicking the 
application. From what I've read, this is a step that users need to do only 
once per application. They may need to repeat it for each update. My limited 
Googling hasn't turned up anything about if/how this might interfere with the 
Sparkle update framework.

The default setting in Mountain Lion is to allow applications from the Mac App 
Store and those signed with a Developer ID. To make BibDesk installable without 
warning for the users that maintain this default setting, a Developer ID would 
be needed. Getting a Developer ID from Apple requires a $99/year Mac Developer 
program membership. I know a little bit about getting an account from the 
research I did related to distributing an iOS version of BibDesk on the App 
store, which included two phone conversations with people at Apple's developer 
relations. There are basically two options:

1) The person who handles the releases would need to purchase their own 
individual Mac Developer membership, create a private key, obtain a signing 
certificate from Apple, and then use both the private key and signing 
certificate to sign BibDesk for releases. It's supposedly against Apple's terms 
of service to distribute the private key/signing certificate to another person, 
so if someone else wanted to take over releases, they'd have to get their own 
Mac Developer membership and obtain a new signing certificate.

2) Join the Mac Developer program as an organization, which would just be 
$99/year and allow multiple people to do releases. The big problem with doing 
things this way is that it can only be done by a company or (in this case) a 
non-profit organization. I don't know if anyone can be bothered going through 
the process/expense of organizing a board of directors, making by-laws, filing 
legal documents, etc.

If someone does get their own Mac Developer program membership, then they could 
also submit BibDesk to the Mac App store. The main disadvantages are that the 
publisher would be listed as an individual person, and transferring the 
distribution responsibilities to someone else would require users to 
re-download the app to continue receiving updates automatically through the 
store. On this iOS side, I thought this would be annoying but worth it vs. not 
having any iOS version. On the Mac side, I'm not so sure.

Cheers.

-Colin
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