[MACTCL] Pulling out of Mac App Store

[Kevin W. <kw...@co...>]

Hi all,

Since I was (I believe) the first Tcl-Mac developer to get an app 
accepted into Apple's Mac App Store, it may be appropriate for me to 
announce here that I'm now pulling out of the App Store.

I explain the details at 
http://www.codebykevin.com/blosxom.cgi/2012/09/06#leaving-app-store, but 
the bottom line is that Apple's "sandbox" security restrictions make it 
too hard for my apps to do what I want them to do. The specific issue I 
ran into was that I couldn't exec "/usr/bin/open" to launch an e-mail 
client or web browser; while the "open" command can be configured to 
work with sandbox, at the deepest level Tcl writes a temp file to 
/private/tmp when launching a child process, and that is also a no-no 
under the sandbox guidelines.

A separate issue, not at present a concern but lurking on the margins, 
is that Tk-Cocoa also violates the App Store guidelines in many ways by 
calling into private Apple API's for drawing and window management; this 
was by design, emulating WebKit itself, and the only way I could work 
around it was by linking to Apple's system installation of the Tk 
frameworks. If Apple ever decides to remove Tk from its system 
libraries, I would be forced to withdraw my apps anyway.

The bottom line is that I consider the App Store guidelines too 
restrictive for me to develop the way I want, and for my apps to have 
the functionality I'd like; and I'm not the only developer withrawing 
from the App Store because of such concerns. If anyone else in on the 
list was contemplating submitting a Tk app to the App Store, it's useful 
to keep these things in mind.

(I had posted a tutorial on submitting a Tk app to the App Store--I'll 
leave it up for now, but may remove it in the future. Let me know if 
there's interest.)

Thanks,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com