Sandboxing the PubSub framework

Are you having trouble sandboxing your app for the Mac App Store? I did and here is my experience on sandboxing News Anchor that uses Apple’s PubSub framework and didn’t play well with the sandbox. This cost me a DTS ticket and you will want to pay attention if your app also consumes RSS/ATOM feed data.

Lion’s sandboxing deadline may have been pushed back, but News Anchor came through and met the original date. Bringing News Anchor into the sandbox cost me one of the two precious DTS tickets in my quota, due to the difficulties in getting the PubSub framework to function in the environment. I’d figured I ought to write this out to contribute back to the Mac Developer community.

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Lion "Production" Day One: Xcode snafu

The last (hopefully) last step of my migration to Lion was installing the latest public release of Xcode. Again I hit some snags. On first (and subsequent) launches, Xcode crashes with some undefined references to the iPhone SDK private plugin. The issue was finally resolved by re-installing iTunes 10.5 beta. It was Xcode 4.1.1 and…
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LifeHack: Achieve real multitasking on iOS

Let’s face it, multitasking doesn’t really exist on the iOS for third party apps. Even the new “multitasking” features of iOS 4.0 is only task switching — not real multitasking since 3rd party applications get frozen when it enters the background. For example, while the Dropbox app is downloading a large file, you can’t switch…
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How I said "no thank you" to Apple’s job offer

Recently I’ve said “no thanks” to Apple’s job offer. Was I stupid? Probably. But probably not. A few days ago, I’ve received a LinkedIn message from Jennifer Rakow that claims to be an Apple recruiter. She told me that she had several opportunities and asked whether I would be interested to work for her company.…
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Top 7 Podcasts for Mac Indie Developers

You’re an indie developer. You spend your time developing your product, answering customer support, or promoting your application. You might even still have a day job or consulting gig outside of your Mac software venture. You’re stretched for time. How can you get relevant information that fits your busy schedule? One answer is podcasts. With…
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Supporting Leopard while developing in Snow Leopard

Apparently Apple’s Cocoa method availability documentation is not enough to determine whether something will work on an earlier version of Mac OS X. That is, avoiding 10.6-only methods doesn’t ensure that your application will also work flawlessly in 10.5. As a first-time Mac developer programming an application on Snow Leopard that is also targeted for…
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Saving Quartz Composition for distribution

Today I learned a very important lesson when saving Quartz Composer composition files for use in other machines: always save the composition as a flat file. Even though according to Wikipedia that quartz composer version 4.0 saves virtual patches in the composition as a fallback, the composition may not run properly if it isn’t saved…
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Looks like Snow Leopard is the new Vista

If John Hodgman (the PC guy) doesn’t work for Apple, I guess he’d be saying this to Justin Long (the Mac guy) PC: Hi, I heard that Snow Leopard is having crashing issues. Mac: Yeah, you’re right. Safari crashes randomly and XCode crashes persistently. PC: Seems like you’re having a bad Vista day. Wanna get Windows…
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