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Bein' a Leopard hater

I'll admit that Leopard is cool, and that there are a whole bunch of new features that I can use, as a programmer, to do cool things.

But what really irritates me is being locked out of the biggest user-visible features.

For example, suppose I want to write a program that uses Quick Look to generate previews. Let's look at the Quick Look Programming Guide:

Clients of Quick Look request thumbnails and previews for listed and selected documents, respectively, and receive images for display. These clients are currently restricted to certain Apple-developed system applications, particularly Finder, Spotlight, Time Machine, and FileSync. [emphasis mine]

Ow. While this isn't strictly true (while you can't do previews, you can use QLThumbnailImageCreate for thumbnails), it's painful. As much as Apple may insist that it's not the case that you're only there to play in their playground, eventually you get the idea.

Or even worse, Time Machine. It locks you out in multiple directions.

I've done work with MacFUSE, and there are lots of awesome filesystems that it allows. Suppose I were to bring cvsfs-fuse to the Mac. CVS keeps file history, and it would be cool to browse file history using the Time Machine metaphor and tools. Can I? Nope, sorry.

Or perhaps on the other side of things, suppose I want to allow my app to browse through history like the Finder, Address Book, iPhoto and all the other apps that Steve demo-ed Time Machine in. Is there an API? No, sorry, the only Time Machine APIs are to set exclusion paths (CSBackup[Is|Set]ItemExcluded).

Yes, I know I can figure out how to do it myself. I can dig around in the frameworks to get Quick Look previews, and I can manually crawl around in Time Machine backups. But I'm still limited as to what I can do, and it's error-prone and fragile. That's not the way to go for supportable software.

C'mon, Apple. I know it's your sandbox. You've taken your ball and gone home many a time. But please let us play with your toys.

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Comments

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