new sandbox rules and apple events

Dear All,

I have three apps on App Store with entitlements for sending apple events to various apps like Mail, textEdit, iPhoto, Photoshop. These entitlements were under the key:

com.apple.security.temporary-exception.apple-events

which made everyone nervous (the temporary part) and now the temporary clause is coming to en end, or so it seems.

the docs say we must use the new key

com.apple.security.scripting-targets

which then refers to an app like com.apple.mail and then to an “access-group” like com.apple.mail.compose.

The only trouble is, you have to find these “access-groups” in the sdef for the app and besides their example of com.apple.mail.compose, there are none! So they recommend you file a bug report and the engineers will include that group in a future OS release (will they?) which may be when…? In the mean time they say you can use

com.apple.security.temporary-exception.apple-events:before: 10.8

which will keep things going. But what about 10.8? My apps will break on 10.8 without the old entitlement. This is starting to look like a wild catch 22.

Not to mention third party apps like Photoshop. There seems to be no way to include these going forward.

Now when I submit it gets rejected saying com.apple.security.temporary-exception.apple-events is deprecated. Yet in the Docs it also says you can continue to use that key while you are asking for the “access-group” but they won’t have it.

You can see what they are trying to do. An example would be to prevent hackers from making your app send out a million emails by limiting Mail to the “compose” rule - no address field allowed via apple events. The dumbing down continues.

Anyone encountered this yet or have any ideas? I think Shane’s epithet concerning App Store was quite well put; “life is too short” and I am regretting going through layers of difficulty to get these in the Store in the first place.

Cheers, Rob

Hello Bob,

I have been thru this too.

I am not using AppleScript to compose Mail, but have bundled Apple’s Sample Code: SBSendEmail.

Which in the end is sending Apple Events too.

My app could run under 10.7 and now I have to require my possible users for 10.8 (not good).

"com.apple.security.temporary-exception.apple-events:before: 10.8 " would cause my app to crash!!!

And so instead of implementing it, I simply decided to move on forward and require 10.8 for my app.

Now I have moved on to Mavericks, and as I try to compile some of my old apps that talk and collect data from Filemaker DBs, they would time out on events.

I tried all sort of things “clean”, change settings under build settings, and got it running, but I must confess, I don’t know what I did to get them working.

Lack of documentation: yes, AppleScript is my first programming language, and for the past 2 years I learned that AppleScriptObjC is way harder to learn than plain Objective C (far more documented and supported).

Although AppleScript has been in the guts of Mac Os X (since birth?) I guess you have to accept the facts that Apple is focussed on operating systems that support different devices (iOS and Mac Os X), I am very sorry for this, but although Apple’s engineer deny, AppleScript is going to go a long way down the hill with Apple’s new policies.

Unless we see in the future iOS support for AppleScript… (I doubt!)

I am so sorry…