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by: Bernard Teo








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Bernard Teo
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Fri 22 Jul 2011

OS X Lion's 3000 new APIs

Category : Technology/Lion3000APIs.txt

If you get to see Apple's Developer pages, you will see this page about the 3000 new APIs in Lion :

But the other side of the story, about the APIs that are lost or being pruned away (being deprecated in developer-speak) - that is not so well known.

Among those being deprecated are two specific API calls that I've used to build all these server setup apps. They're the calls that allow my system configuration tools to acquire admin privileges from the user so that they can move files into protected directories like /Library and /System/Library and /etc. These calls are going away and they don't look like being replaced. So if I don't find a way to get around this, I won't be able to build any more server setup apps going forward.

I would leave the conspiracy theories to others, like Apple wants to own everything (well, I'm not even allowed into the App Store with these apps - Apple specifically forbids apps that require escalation to admin privileges).

But I think I can build pretty good server administration tools, if at least only for my own use. So I will need to find another way. And soon.

But before that, I need to get Luca, my accounting app, working in Lion. It's not just a simple re-compile for Lion because Luca needs to go through database frameworks (like my version of Microsoft's ODBC calls) to get to the database servers and these frameworks need to be built from source for Lion and often they can fail to build when the Mac OS changes or the MySQL or PostgreSQL versions change. "So you want to charge even though you have no new features?" It's work, man, and I'll probably build this version of Luca only for the people who really need it.

(And I've got nib user-interface files that I can't now open in Lion because the system for building Interface Builder plug-ins change in Lion. There isn't even an Interface Builder.app in Lion. It's all built into Xcode which has changed, drastically.)

Posted at 10:09AM UTC | permalink

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