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!
