(2012-08-15) Sandboxed Documents

Watts Martin on the hassles around the "sandboxed documents" model in IOS, spreading to MacOs X. Mac AppStore applications must be “sandboxed” the way iOS applications are. iOS applications include documents in their sandboxes: a document “owned” by an application can only be seen by that application. If I save a Markdown document in Byword on my iPad, no other iPad application—even if I have dozens of other ones that can handle plain text—can see it, unless I can use “Open in…” from in Byword itself... I’ve argued in the past that the kind of “open” we should really care about is Open Data. It shouldn’t matter whether I’m using Emacs or BBEdit or Byword for text, GIMP or Photoshop or Acorn to edit a PNG file, Alpine or Postbox to access mail on IMAP servers. If all of your meaningful data is open, you seriously reduce the friction inherent in switching applications or even computing Platform-s.

This has been a real annoyance for me in Android:

• FBReader bookmarks 2012-03-29-FbreaderHighlightsControl
• FlickNote notes - if I don't need SimpleNote 2012-07-13-SimplenoteAndNotationalvelocityDumpingLocalNotes