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Apple: developers now have until June 1 to sandbox apps for the Mac App Store
Back in the fall, Apple gave developers an ultimatum: sandbox your applications, or see yourself out of the Mac App Store and sell your apps elsewhere. Originally, devs had until March 1st to make the change, which limits the resources apps can access, thereby making a malware infection less likely. Still, sandboxing inherently means less control for developers: the fewer resources an app can use, the less it can actually do. Well, code monkeys, you've now got a few more months to decide which camp you'd rather be in: Apple has extended that deadline to June 1st. As MacRumors notes, the move comes amid mounting concerns from developers, who have been complaining of bugs and other issues associated with the sandboxing process. In a statement on its developer site, Apple gave a pithier explanation, saying it wants to give devs more time to make use of new sandboxing entitlements available in OS X 10.7.3, along with new APIs in Xcode 4.3.
Boxee delays Netflix integration again, cites security requirements as the culprit
We hoped Boxee would surprise us at the eleventh hour and announce it had finally added Netflix to the service -- technically making good on its end of January deadline. Instead, the company's blog is now reporting that the service is "anticipated soon." Apparently, the service is running fine on the device in the company's offices -- which, mind you they said back in December too, -- but it still failed to satisfy Netflix's security requirements. While that sounds like a big thing to miss in our books, a comment by Boxee's VP of Marketing, Andrew Kippen, suggests the company just discovered the issue only an hour before midnight. This marks the second time users have been asked to re-adjust their expectations for when the big red box might pop up on their favorite media manager, but to Boxee's credit, we were glad to see the company come right out with the situation instead of leaving us all on pins and needles. Now, let's just hope this whole incident gets sorted out pronto, so we don't have to break bad news to our Watch Instantly lovin' hearts ever again.
Anti-Aliased: Don't hate the playa, hate the developa
So I noticed something last week, in the comments section of my piece on UI design, that finally kicked me back into "endless rant" mode. It's a sentiment that I've noticed in the video game community at large for a while now, but I never really knew how to approach it until recently, thanks to my own life experiences with games. It's an idea that's pretty misinformed on how the industry works. It's the idea that the developers behind any given game are an idiots. According to commenters, they're all blind, non-gamer morons, bumbling around in the dark without the slightest sense of what game mechanics are actually fun. Why are these bumbling morons in the industry? Why don't they listen to the endless array of golden ideas that pop up on game forums? Don't they realize that these revolutionary ideas will turn every game into double-rainbow-crapping unicorns? Why haven't 15% of my readers (a totally accurate statistic, mind you) figured out how sarcastic I'm being at this point in the introduction? This week we're going after some of the common misconceptions about developers and game design, and how making a game as complex as an MMO is really never as easy as you claim it is.
