On the plus side, while Mueller had feared last November that Apple's sandboxing approach would break other Acorn features, like plug-in and screenshot support, "it looks like Apple built in some smarts that look for user intent with regards to" features like those.

Rich Siegel of spoke to about his concerns regarding sandboxing Last November too, rattling off a long list of features in the company's popular text editor BBEdit that he feared might not be allowed going forward: multi-file search and replace; text factory applications; multi-application automation using AppleScript or Automator; Open File by Name; disk browsers; live folder views in projects; SCM integration; bulk HTML tools operations (syntax check, site update); and lots of behind-the-scenes stuff such as scanning directories for ctags data. Back then, Siegel said he literally wasn't sure which features BBEdit would be able to continue to support once sandboxed. And now that sandboxing is here, Siegel isn't sure:

"The question really remains wide open," he wrote in an email to . "With a technology like sandboxing, any feature changes are dictated by the underlying system; so we can't really know whether a given feature or behavior is going to work until we test it in the sandboxed environment." While Bare Bones knows that BBEdit features like its Unix command line tools and privilege escalation when saving over root-owned files will never work in the sandbox, "there's a lot of testing to do" with other features in the software. And, of course, once Bare Bones identifies issues that don't work, Siegel says, "we have to decide whether to neuter the feature entirely, or agitate with Apple for changes to the system to enable it to work." He concludes: "In the end, though, only time will tell what the final sandboxed product looks like."

Also back in November, Rob Griffiths--a former senior editor and now part of --expressed concern that several of the company's apps (, , and ) would simply need to get pulled from the Mac App Store entirely once the sandboxing deadline arrived. All three of those apps leverage something called the Accessibility APIs, which lets them simulate various user interactions to work their magic.

Griffiths confirmed to that indeed, Apple has offered no new entitlements for developers to use the Accessibility APIs in a sandboxed environment. That means Many Tricks can't release any new features to those apps in the Mac App Store, only bug fixes. For major new releases, Many Tricks will return to relying upon direct sales from its website instead.