Darren Steadman

A while back I wrote a couple of articles that contained predictions and suggestions as to where Apple could go with the mac app store.

Well it appears that most of those predictions have come true in a round about fashion with the introduction of gatekeeper in the preview version of OS X 10.8.

Gatekeeper for those who don’t already know will be a system that restricts what applications can be run, but instead of being totally controlling gives the user several levels of restriction. This will basically mean that it will be possible to lock down a machine to:

 
The nice thing for developers will be that they can still get apps onto macs without needing to be part of the app store by signing their applications while keeping a level of protection as Apple can revoke the certificate at any time thus stopping those applications from running on any mac. There are the obvious problems that could occur like certificates being revoked by accident etc, but generally it gives the user more safety.

This is the same kind of feature I’d like to see introduced into Windows 8, then we might be able to avoid in Windows some of the prevention instead of cure applications that are present that will no longer be needed in OS X.

I would imagine that as time goes by Apple might lock things down even further and remove the third option making it a requirement for all applications to be signed at a minimum.