iMedia 3 approved in App Store

[Peter Baumgartner]

Hi everybody,

Today we finally released FotoMagico 4, which includes sandboxed iMedia 3. Took us quite a while with many rejections and numerous modifications, but now it looks like we are good. I hope that other apps that are going to adopt iMedia 3 will now have a more straightforward App Store submission experience!

Thanks to everybody who contributed to the development of iMedia 3.

Cheers,
Peter

[Daniel Jalkut]

This is great news, Peter! I'm curious if the approval in the end relies on a specific list of Radar bug reports that you filed to support temporary entitlements? Or is the nature of the XPC-based sequestering of access good enough to satisfy their concerns by itself?

Daniel

[kar...@me.com]

Congratulations Peter!  I've been kind of "out of the loop" regarding iMedia lately, and I didn't realize it had taken so long…

Dan

--
Dan Wood
dw...@karelia.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/danwood
Karelia Software — Sandvox for the Mac
http://www.karelia.com/

It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of each passing ship - General Omar Bradley

--

Dan Wood

dw...@karelia.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/danwood

Karelia Software — Sandvox for the Mac

http://www.karelia.com/

"A time comes when silence is betrayal."

Martin Luther King, Jr. 

[Peter Baumgartner]

Hi Daniel,

iMedia 3 is based on XPC services (for each parser) with specific entitlements. In our initial version we did rely on temporary exceptions, however these didn't make through the app store despite the advice that Aerie gave us at the Lion dev kitchen. So we did revise iMedia 3 to work without the temporary exception entitlements. It now relies on user authorization for media libraries in non-standard locations (using Powerbox).

We designed it in a way, so that even funky installations were the media files are scattered across folders outside the library location (as possible in iTunes or Lightroom) are supported. In other words authorizing access to a media library or individual media files is possible, and will be persisted. However, if user just store their media files in the standard media folders, then they should never be bothered with authorization request dialogs.

iMedia 3 also contains other nice enhancements, e.g. detection of missing media files, new alert popovers, UI customization, and more. I'll try to post a more detailed description in the next few days.

Peter

[Daniel Jalkut]

This is really awesome, thanks for all the hard work you put into this. I'm encouraged that I'll be able to sandbox MarsEdit without losing massive iMedia functionality.

I can confirm that the Powerbox stuff is working here. I ran FotoMagico and was able to authorize both a Lightroom library, and my iTunes library that resides on a separate, AFP mounted volume (!). The only quirk (mentioned privately to Florian) was when I was prompted to authorize for the iTunes library, it just had me sitting at a list of all m volumes with no clues about needing to navigate in to find the library folder.

Daniel

[Jörg Jacobsen]

Hi Daniel,

when there are multiple not entitled libraries the framework is supposed to ask the user for entitling the first common ancestor directory (possibly /Volumes) regarding those libraries. This is to ask the user as few times as possible for entitlements. But could be it confuses him more than it helps?

Jörg.

[Daniel Jalkut]

Thanks, Jörg. After looking into this more carefully with Peter today we determined that indeed it was because it was looking for permission to take care of multiple locations on differing volumes.

It's a tough challenge to solve … it seems like the Powerbox could also do something to provide more usability in this regard.

Daniel

[Mike Abdullah]

On 12 Oct 2012, at 05:55, Daniel Jalkut wrote:

> Thanks, Jörg. After looking into this more carefully with Peter today we determined that indeed it was because it was looking for permission to take care of multiple locations on differing volumes.
>
> It's a tough challenge to solve … it seems like the Powerbox could also do something to provide more usability in this regard.

I argue that we want to, generally, prompt once per library. Trying to direct people to select a folder that encompasses all their libraries would seem to require one of the following:

* an understanding of the limits faced by sandboxed apps, and how an open panel can be used to handle that
* following an instruction from the app on good faith

The first seems totally unreasonable for our customers, and the second is just encouraging bad behaviour. A prompt to “Select a library, folder or disk” seems more easily understood to our customers.

Mike.