Why the Mac App Sandbox Makes Me Sad ⇥

Pauli Ojala:

One side-effect of the sandbox model which makes me particularly sad and nostalgic is that it kills the notion of plugins. This will also affect many of Apple’s own pro apps on the App Store.

This is what kills me. I rely on a few plugins for Aperture and Photoshop, and losing those will be incredibly tough. The good news is that Adobe isn’t selling Photoshop on the App Store, so they don’t have to play by the sandboxing rules. But Aperture is sold on the App Store, and it has a small plugin ecosystem of its own. Some of these plugins are extremely valuable to photographers, and to lose them would make their job rough for a great period of time as they figure out various workarounds.