Panic’s Mac App Store Strawman

Panic has put up a whiny post detailing why Coda 2.5 won’t be on the Mac App Store because of growing pains with the sandbox.

That’s all well and good, except, well, read the “features” that need to break out of the sandbox. Namely, accessing files and folders on your local Mac you don’t have ownership over (have we forgotten how chown works?), its built in Terminal emulator (I’m on a fucking Mac, I have one of those already), and Get Info having chmod access to local files…

See a trend? It’s all regarding a bunch of local stuff I don’t need Panic to touch. Real world web development takes place on remote servers as much as locally. Even in the tightest sandbox, it’s not the end of the world to simply tell your local Mac to allow SSH and SFTP access to your web root. This, btw, is the only way to access your local mysql server in ANY app. You can’t just open its storage root and expect to update tables.

Panic, please stop whining about stupid features I don’t care about, and maybe try enhancing cool stuff, and maybe make the world’s first MSSQL client written in Cocoa and add value to your app instead of trying to blame Apple for wasting time on features I don’t need that you knew were going to be a problem.

Why did I call this a strawman? Because it sounds like they might be using sandboxing as justification for leaving the MAS when in reality it’s for economic reasons. That would be perfectly fine, just be honest about it.

/rant