iPack

I have finished the development of iPack 1.98. It is a very important release for upcoming Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8): all apps must run sandboxed.

This means a lot. Almost all apps must change their way to access user files and folders. Before Mountain Lion, once an app is installed, it is able to read, write and enumerate all resources in your Mac. From developers’ point of view, coding could be casual, some background jobs could be done. But it is not safe for end users.

In Mountain Lion, an app is able to access a file only if it is explicitly granted by the user: by Open/Save dialog or by dragging files into its dock icon. In fact, there are more restrictions: if you write an app to list all files within Documents folder, it is prohibited now. You have only access to a couple of predefined folders which do not include Documents.

iPack, as a trustable app, is now fully App Sandbox compliant. It has never touched anything other than the archive you explicitly opened. That is why it took me only few hours to make it “sandboxable”.

Welcome to a whole new secured world!

June 1, 2012 is the deadline for sandboxing apps on the Mac App Store. The good news: iPack 1.98 should be compliant with sandboxing in Lion and upcoming Mountain Lion.

There are 12 days before 2012. What will happen in these 12 days?

This is a quick fix update: iPack failed to add files when launched from “Compress by iPack” in Finder’s Service menu.

Yes. It’s there.

Soon there will be a quick bug fix upgrade (version 1.91) which resolves several regressions since version 1.85.

I said that iPack 1.8 will be the last 1.x series before iPack 2, but now I have to unsay it because there will be a special 1.9 release series.

So, what’s so special?

The answer is: iPack is finally able to create archives in, extract files to a folder that requires your authentication to write files to. When you first time create an archive in a folder, or extract files to a folder, if the folder requires administrator rights (i.e., root permission) of write, iPack will ask you to enter your password to elevate itself as administrator, then do the works.

iPack 1.87 has been approved by Apple and is available on Mac App Store.

The big change for this update is: SPEED.

Before iPack 1.87, opening a big archive which contains tens of thousands of files could be really something that you suffer from. This is not a defect: for better support of non-roman characters, iPack uses width-based algorithm to compare file names to determine if they are equivalent because of the complexity of character encoding method. Believe it or not: there are more than 3 encodings for “á”.

But for a lot of users, this is not necessary. So, iPack 1.87 gets a speed-boost by:

1. introducing an internal buffer to greatly speed up the file name matching procedures.
2. allowing file name matching based on direct character matching, and still Unicode-aware.

These 2 changes bring about a 10x speed up when opening a JAR file which contains more than 15,000 files (wow!).

If you need the old matching rules, you can enable it by unchecking “Don’t use width-insensitive file name matching rule” in Preferences | General | Behaviors.

Enjoy!

Today iPack got ranked #17 in China Mac App Store.

Thank you guys for supporting iPack.

iPack 1.81 has been available on Mac App Store. It contains several bug fixes found during past weeks. I also have had committed iPack 1.85 which allows you extract archives directly in Finder.

iPack 2 is still under development and almost feature-complete. I hope that an initial alpha build could be available before Christmas 2011.

iPack 1.80 is available on Mac App Store. As I said, version 1.8x will be last 1.x version before iPack 2, the only new thing is “Finder Integration”. Small improvements will be back-ported to version 1.8x.

+ New: iPack is integrated to Finder. Now you can select files or folders in Finder then compress them with iPack from Services of the contextual menu (right-click the mouse and you will see it).

+ New: automatically set archive file name of new archives

* Fixed: “Password for files and file names” causes failure on zip creation