If you’ve been following the debate surrounding Apple’s Application Sandbox, you know that many developers are concerned about the implications for existing apps of adopting the sandbox. Apple has been threatening for almost a year that apps for sale in the Mac App Store will need to embrace the Application Sandbox, or else further updates [...]

For the upcoming Gatekeeper feature in Mac OS X 10.8, Apple will make it easy for customers to prevent software from running that has not been digitally “signed” by developers with a certificate from Apple called the Developer ID certificate. Many developers already choose to sign software using self-generated signing certificates. I wrote many years [...]

Most Mac and iOS developers know that when you build an application, you advertise a number of details about the application in the “Info.plist” file, located inside the application bundle. You can examine any application on your Mac and see what kind of information the developer has conveyed about it: Navigate to a .app file [...]

One of the thrills of software development is how much power is placed into the hands, literally, of a single engineer. Software takes work, and lots of it. But thanks to frameworks of reusable code, individuals are consistently able to “outbuild” the work of our predecessors, while exerting the same or less effort. Consider the work [...]