genkiyooka/MacRuntimeSandboxDetection
For CFPlugIn and AudioUnit developers - how to check Mac App Store sandbox capabilities at runtime.

If you write system components (i.e. CoreAudio AudioUnit), CFPlugIn bundles or loadable Cocoa frameworks which are shared among applications (like haxies), you may wish to detect the capabilities of the sandbox environment into which you've been loaded so you can gracefully disable features and so forth.

Naive implementations of such loadable code often dump huge volumes of system messages into the Console.log - not useful to anyone.

Labels: app store, c++, cocoa, mac runtime sandbox detection, sandbox, secure coding mac, security tools mac

ARM-Based Chips Make Better Windows PCs, Says Qualcomm CEO - Ina Fried - Mobile - AllThingsD: "Qualcomm has sponsored a contest to encourage developers to write Windows RT apps as well as, in some cases, help to fund their development. Jacobs said that Microsoft isn’t really being given the benefit of the doubt here, despite its long track record of attracting developers."

Unfortunately, nothing as powerful as Cocoa is likely to debut on any platform any time soon.

Labels: cocoa, windows rt

amazingsyco/XPCKit · GitHub: "XPC simplified for Cocoa. Deal with NS* objects instead of xpc_object_t"

If you're partitioning your application for sandboxing, check out XPCKit, which greatly simplifies the creation of XPC services using Cocoa.

NOTE: Mountain Lion includes an even slicker way to do this, but it is not backwards compatible to Lion.

Labels: cocoa, sandbox, XPC service

Marc Liyanage - Blog - Developer - Mac OS X Application Code Signing
Benefits of Signing Applications on Mac OS X The latest version 10.5 (Leopard) of Mac OS X adds the ability to digitally sign executable code. I wanted to do that with one of our Mac OS X applications, the image uploader for our snapmania Online Photo Manager. Right now, the main user-visible benefit of signed applications is that accessing objects in the user’s Keychain no longer triggers this confirmation dialog after a new version of the application is installed:"

SOURCE:http://www.entropy.ch/blog/Developer/2008/02/11/Mac-OS-X-Application-Code-Signing.html

Here's a little codesigning information nugget from the interweb.

Labels: cocoa, codesigning, security

Preventing systematic piracy in Cocoa with Code Signing | CocoaLab

Here's a nice thread about the motivation behind using the Security.framework to enforce application bundle integrity.

Labels: cocoa, codesigning, mac app store, piracy

Gatekeeper Already Present in OS X 10.7.3, Available for Developer Testing [Archive] - MacRumors Forums: "By default, Gatekeeper is not enabled in Mac OS X v10.7.3. For testing purposes, you can turn it on by using the new Mac OS X system policy control command-line tool, spctl(8).Running the command 'sudo spctl' in Terminal will enable Gatekeeper on OS X 10.7.3."

A better description of enabling gatekeeper under 10.7.3 is here:
https://developer.apple.com/resources/developer-id/Developer-ID-Tutorial.pdf

In my testing under 10.7.3, the spctl commands did not work as described. But you can get it to work if you follow the macrumors post.

Labels: cocoa, gatekeeper, mac, sandbox