Between a rock and a hard place – our decision to abandon the Mac App Store (opens in new tab)

Unfortunately, it appears this may be a "do as I say, not as I do" situation.

The answer is simple, Apple's apps will have special access that will make them better than 3rd party apps which have to jump through all these hoops.

Actually, Logic Pro does not interact with VST plugins at all. It interacts with AU (Audio Unit) plugins. Plugins like Native Instrument's etc that come as VST plugins also come in AU versions.

Is Apple going to cripple Logic Studio?

No, Apple is not going to cripple Logic Studio. They even said so, a few months ago.

Or will they also have to take their "pro" software out of the appstore?

They can also do whatever they want with THEIR apps in the appstore, like have them there despite not implementing sanboxing, or giving them arbitrary sanboxing rights (after all, Apple TRUSTS their own apps not to be malware).

The only way to parlay that into control of the system would be to break the sandbox. And then, because OS X default security is fairly sane, the only way to do real lasting damage is to use a further exploit to escalate your permissions.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Twilight_Hack#Explanation

Splinter Cell and MechAssault where famous for this. The bug is actually in the XBox Dashboard code itself, so the Host system was buggy.

Rather than presenting it as some pointless mechanical chore in which you direct a user to a specific file in a known place, wouldn't "Choose where you would like Foo.app to save your XYZ (project/file/whatever)" make a lot more sense?

I don't know if you have used/use Final Cut 6/7, but it is a phenomenally ugly, often poor performing, generally unintuitive piece of software. I can see where the motivation for a full reboot would stem from.

Now, a reboot that involves consolidating formerly modular panes into a single window when the target market typically works on two, three or more displays is just dumb. A reboot that was, as a practical matter, 0% backwards-compatible may have been necessary, but if it could have been avoided, it should have been. But buried under all the mistakes, I think there was some genuine good intent (yes, I know I'm grasping at straws).

I primarily work with music, and you don't need to be as involved as I am or attend as many shows as I do to know that for any artist/band that uses a laptop on stage, the MacBook Pro is the de facto standard. The same applies to Mac Pros in studios (although those boxes may be going the way of the Dodo as well).

None of this necessarily makes a difference to Apple; the new features in Mountain Lion which focus on Chinese web portals and social networks serve as a reminder that the emerging Chinese middle class is likely as important a segment to Apple as any, and the number of potential customers in that group already dwarfs the ranks of every DJ, producer, sound engineer, and electronic musician on earth.

Still, it would be a great disappointment to me and many others if Apple were to abandon such a loyal group of customers who helped them reach this point.

Unlike, say, Adobe, that merely piles incremental bloat upon incremental bloat, and calls it a "new version of the suite".

The complains are from people that:

1) see a black interface as some kind of iMovie-fication (iMovie is black, so they have dumded down FCP).

2) Think professional software means convoluted GUI (they made things simpler, so they have dumbed it down)

3) Expect a rewrite of a 10+ year old codebase to have feature parity with the old version from day one.

4) Expect a rewrite of a 10+ year old codebase, with the intention to support modern movie making practices, to also cater for obsolete practices that the old version covered (like tape editing).

I guess I should step back a bit and make my argument more clear. I'm not opposed to the concept of sandboxing, I recognize the benefits of these policies as Apple's user base grows and malware becomes a greater concern.

My contention is that the imposition this places on users and developers alike will most likely dissuade pro media software developers from participating in the Mac App Store to begin with, thereby depriving Apple of potential income, depriving developers access to useful features like iCloud file sharing/mirroring, and exposing users to the very risks this policy is intended to shield them from.

They're just disallowed from supporting plugins in the manner that they have been on every platform for 20 or 30 years.

As someone who has lived through a protracted antitrust review (Google acquiring ITA Software, a company I co-founded), I can tell you that there are dozens of hard-working people at the DOJ and FTC ready to make their careers on taking Apple down should Apple give them the tools to do so. A "some animals are more equal than others" app store policy -- whether intended or unintended -- is definitely fodder for a juicy DOJ/FTC lawsuit.

That gives a photo editor, a movie editor, spreadsheet, and word processor.

What DID they do to Final Cut? They spend tons of money and engineering time to rewrite the app from scratch with a modern codebase and added new innovative features. The got it to 64bit, they added the magnetic timeline (HUGE timesaver), the improved tons of workflow stuff, they made it take advantage of multiple cores, and they made it work with files in whatever format they are in to begin with.

In the process, as with any version 1.0 app, FPCX lost a few of the features that the old, bloated, version of FCP had. Some because you just cannot just scratch from scratch and replicate absolutely everything at once, and others because they don't make much sense moving forward. Some of those features, like multicam editing, they delivered in subsequent minor versions (of which there have been 3 already).

That is much more than what Adobe does, which is incrementally adding a few features, without ever rethinking their apps, and keeps adding bloat upon bloat (Flash based custom panels, anyone?) to the same 10 or 20 year old codebase. Apple betted on the future, Adobe plays it safe.

So, I beg to differ in respect to FCP X.

Have you noticed how little we talk about the Mac Pro anymore?"

And why should they? A quad core iMac is just as capable for the needs of 90% of creatives, and in fact, if you looked at any design studio in the past 2-3 years you were more likely to find one of those than a Mac Pro or a G5.

They also know that they sell a very small amount of those Pro machines, and it's not like Intel is making new chips for them all the time.

Besides, Thunderbird, the Apple/Intel interconnect perfectly suited for professionals and creatives that no other PC vendor took the time and effort to create, solves most of the connectivity issues that an iMac (or even a MacBook Pro laptop) had related to a Mac Pro.

I don't understand: What prevents an app from having an "Add Plugin..." dialog that uses the sandboxed file browser to locate a plugin library in whatever sensible format?

Is that a bad thing? I'm not saying it will happen soon, or that those of us long in the tooth will go easily, but I honestly think it's the future.

Think about young teenagers who will soon be "in charge". They snap a pic on their phone and send it to someone else. Nobody cares where it is in the filesystem, or even what the filename is. I used to meticulously name, tag and organize my mp3 collection into folders and sub-folders. Now I don't even know where they are on my hard drive - because I just don't care.

Those are old concepts we used to rely on to find and use information stored inside the computer, but I honestly don't see the need for the in the future. We can stop focusing on the "how" of the computer, and focus on the doing.

I will add that "power" users like developers will require these kind of concepts for a lot longer than your average Joe, but I still see it becoming less and less important.

If you find it so objectionable, go build your own hardware and OS platform. This isn't a matter of human rights because no one is telling you that you can't make your own.