gotow

Agreed - the average Default Folder X user is definitely more competent than the average Mac user (from my standpoint doing tech support, thank goodness). That's part of the reason I'm able to make a living outside the App Store - for my particular stable of apps, customers are willing and able to come find my website. There are also issues with the App Store that don't involve sandboxing, such as the fact that it's tough to build any sort of relationship with customers when we don't get any data from Apple about them, can't reply to App Store reviews, can't market or sell upgrades, etc. It makes it a lot harder to make this a long-term business instead of just a hobby.

The issue here is that the majority of Mac users are not as savvy as HN readers. Apple rightly avoids popping up these kinds of prompts because the typical user has no idea what the request means, much less the security implications of allowing it. If you're going to sandbox, what Apple's doing makes (some) sense - the issue is whether sandboxing needs more granularity, more capabilities and better support from Apple on the developer side. Then again, some things would still be impossible unless Apple granted special exceptions somehow. It's a tradeoff - Apple has to choose a line somewhere - they've chosen it where they have, knowing that it limits what developers can do and completely blocks certain classes of apps. When sandboxing was first introduced and I objected, I was told that Apple was willing to accept some "collateral damage" in return for what they perceived as better security.

I'm the developer. Jettison and HistoryHound have always been available as direct purchases as well as through the Mac App Store. Given the sales volume I got from the Mac App Store vs sales through my website (see the comments about lousy discoverability), it wasn't worth investing more time jumping through Apple's hoops to ship products that would be inferior to what I can write outside the App Store. That doesn't mean I "didn't want to do the work" - it means it doesn't make sense for my situation and my apps. And that's just the case for those two. Two other popular apps I've written - Default Folder X and App Tamer - are impossible to implement in the sandboxed environment. In cases like that, Apple's sandboxing constrains what devs can viably do - not everyone can take the risk of bypassing the App Store, and if they can't, the Mac community misses out because those apps just never get written.

I'd wait - actually a couple of weeks, if you can. Then the WWDC noise will have subsided and columnists and bloggers will be looking for new news.