Apple's notarization service

A big change that's been happening quietly in MacOS is Apple's Notarization service.

Ever since the App Store opened and was the only place to obtain software for the iPhone ('jailbreaking' excepted), I've been waiting for the sun to set on being able to download and install Mac apps from the web. Which is the core of my business. (Mac App Store sales amount to a small proportion of my income. That balance is fine, because Apple take a whopping 1/3 of the selling price).

Notarization is a step in that direction, although it still leaves developers free to distribute outside the app store. It means that Apple examine the app for malware. At this point they can't reject your app for any reason other than the malware search. They do specify 'hardened runtime' which is a tighter security constraint but I've  not found this to restrict functionality, as the Sandboxing requirement did when the App Store opened.

When the notarization service started last year, it was optional. Now Gatekeeper gives a more preferable message when an app is notarized, and it looks as if 10.15's Gatekeeper will refuse to install apps that haven't been notarized.

It's easy to feel threatened by this and imagine a future where Apple are vetting everything in the same way they do for the app store. For users that's a great thing, it guarantees them a certain standard of quality in any app they may be interested in. As a developer it feels like a constraint on my freedom to build and publish.

It genuinely seems geared towards reducing malware on the Mac. "This is a good thing" says John Martellaro in his column.

https://www.macobserver.com/columns-opinions/editorial/notarization-apple-greatly-reduce-malware-on-macs/?utm_source=macobserver&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_everything

First thoughts on yesterday's announcements

With each year's announcements it's always a relief to hear that the Mac has at least another year of life. The convergence of Mac and iOS is taking many years to happen. Yesterdays talk of enhancing Sierra with efficiencies and switch to the Apple File System was pretty welcome.

I'm very curious about the VR and AR stuff, but more from a 'playing' perspective rather than seeing ways to incorporate them into what I do. But the machine-learning stuff I really can; I've been waiting for an API built into the OS for doing that kind of stuff.

I'd always expected the Mac to continue morphing into iOS but the biggest surprise yesterday was files / drag and drop / enhanced dock in iOS. (Meaning that the convergence is going to end up closer to the Mac than anticipated.) And as Craig demo'd all of this, his iPad screen looked more like the macOS than I'd ever expected.

I'm not that bothered about the home pad, I think the built-in intelligence is a lot of guff, and they're very late to the party with a voice-activated computer in the room, I guess they thought the advanced speaker stuff was an area that Google and Amazon had been neglecting.

Best viewed.....

This makes me laugh out loud... seen at the bottom of one of my favourite sites:

Thankfully the days of 'this site is best viewed in...'  are now largely confined to history - but I'm fully with anyone who doesn't want the ball-ache of spending days trying to make their site look half-decent in certain versions of IE.