On Feb 20, 2012, at 9:29 PM, Mark Munz wrote: > It was later determined that there is no intention of every allowing > any kind of access to usability APIs from a sandboxed app. So they > were apparently to afraid to just come out and say it, but instead > used "internal tracking" option for the same effect.
I believe the current sandbox documentation expressly states that "assistive" applications will not work in the sandbox. This means that software intended to help users with disabilities must not be sandboxed and cannot be distributed in the Mac App Store. And of course, the same applies to any utility applications that use the accessibility APIs for similar purposes, such as my own UI Browser and UI Actions products, as well as any applications based on Apple's own GUI Scripting AppleScript technology. Ditto for applications that send any AppleScript commands to other applications. I suspect that Apple's recent announcements regarding Gatekeeper were in part dictated by Federal regulatory requirements regarding the Americans With Disabilities Act, which prohibits the federal government, as well as many state educational institutions that rely on federal money, from buying computers that do not comply with the ADA. Developers of assistive software and utilities relying on the accessibility API or AppleScript to control other applications must advise their customers running Mountain Lion to select the Gatekeeper option to run applications with developer IDs as well as applications purchased through the Mac App Store -- fortunately, that is the default setting. These restrictions do not apply to applications that only respond to incoming accessibility API notifications or AppleScript commands. The documentation expressly encourages developers to continue to make their applications AppleScriptable, and of course the built-in and custom accessibility API support will continue to be available in the Cocoa frameworks and functional in sandboxed applications and in Mac App Store applications. -- Bill Cheeseman - b...@cheeseman.name _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
