MplayerX Leaving Mac App Store

New submitter technonono writes "MplayerX, a popular and free video player app on Mac OSX, is now leaving Mac App Store 'after arguing with Apple for three months.' The developer claims that Apple's sandboxing policies would strip the app into 'another lame Quicktime X,' which is unacceptable. The app is releasing updates on its own site, where users who bought it from the App Store would most likely never notice them. The situation was 'foretold' by Marco Arment, at least for one app."

Re:Is this a genuine case?

[ModernGeek]

I am assuming that the application cannot access the file system unless a file is within the applications sandbox, or opened through the operating systems open file API.

Procrastination

[Fls'Zen]

They've had over a year to get this straightened out, not three months. If MplayerX won't sell in the app store, some other product will fill the void in that market. This is of course assuming people are going to the app store for such a media player.

Re:Is this a genuine case?

[pushing-robot]

From Apple's design guide:

When a user of your app specifies they want to use a file or a folder, the system adds the associated path to your app’s sandbox. Say, for example, a user drags the ~/Documents folder onto your app’s Dock tile (or onto your app’s Finder icon, or into an open window of your app), thereby indicating they want to use that folder. In response, the system makes the ~/Documents folder, its contents, and its subfolders available to your app.

Starting in OS X v10.7.3, you can retain access to file-system resources by employing a security mechanism, known as security-scoped bookmarks , that preserves user intent. Here are a few examples of app features that can benefit from this:

• A user-selected download, processing, or output folder
• An image browser library file, which points to user-specified images at arbitrary locations
• A complex document format that supports embedded media stored in other locations

It seems like the simplest solution is to have the user choose the folder the videos are in, not the video itself.

You could just have the user pick the folder their video library is stored in, and the player can even create a 'bookmark' so the app can access that folder (and its contents) persistently across restarts.