mapbox/tilemill — Issue #1307: Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion implications
Author: incanus
Created: 2012-02-16 17:59:53+00:00
State: open
Labels: osx

So [10.8 dev preview](http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/) dropped today, and is due out this summer. Using this ticket to track implications and a plan for action. I haven't installed it yet, but I've been reading around.

### Version support

We will probably want to drop 10.6 support, which means implicitly dropped 32-bit support (#918). It's tough enough to support two versions, let alone three across two architectures. I don't think we want to drop 10.7 though -- generally, I've found `N - 1` to be a good support range for already-shipping software.

### Mac App Store

MAS isn't required, but is an option. We might want to spend more time thinking about it for greater exposure.

### Gatekeeper

This is Apple's name for the new dev signing. Basically, for distribution, there is the current way, the MAS way, and now, dev signing alongside them. We could get a MapBox dev signature and sign software with it. Signing is relatively easy -- I've been doing it in apps for years -- and the advantage is a streamlined security model in the OS (with the understanding that Apple can yank certs). Not sure if this requires sandboxing, but I think not -- that's just for MAS.

More info on this: http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/security.html

![](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/575564/security_settings.jpg)

We will probably want to start signing so that we don't have to tell people to change this setting in order to install TileMill.

### Notification Center

Behaves just like on iOS, likely replacing Growl for most people. Not sure this is super-useful to us, though maybe for export job completions. However this requires MAS.

### iCloud

Apple is very much behind this as a big part of their future. While it requires the MAS, if that's a route we go, we might want to consider supporting it. The most likely functionality would be syncing a user's TileMill projects across different machines. So every time you open up a project at any machine, it's right where you left it.

We can add more stuff here as we learn it.

/cc @springmeyer @willwhite @tmcw @gundersen