Over the last several months, we have been working hard in the background to cater to the changes which OS X 10.7 Lion introduced and subsequently the Sandboxing requirements of the App Store.

For the Lion Compatibility, we had to change the underlying framework from Carbon to Cocoa. Some of the visible changes which were implemented are the Full Screen Support and the ability to resize from all sides of the apps. However during the transition, some of the features may not work the same as before or suddenly stop working. We are in the midst of ironing out all the reported issues.

The Sandboxing requirements is a little more complex. The concept of Sandboxing is a nice idea as it means that any application must work within the boundary of a virtual sandbox and would not be allowed to access files or devices outside the sandbox. This means that apps which are sandboxed would not be able access any files without the user’s explicit permission and intervention. Basically for a file to be accessed, the user would need to select the file(s) and to save the output, the user would need to select the location to save the files in. The heightened permissions would only be active for as long as the app is running. Once shut down, the app would lose this permissions and the user would need to reselect the files and folders again. The only files the app can handle are within the sandbox which are files stored separately from what the user can access. The only time the app can handle external user files are when the users explicitly grant the permissions.

Our CM Note Keeper stores your notes in a database which used to exist in the ~/Library/Application Support/ folder. This was the requirement set up by Apple but with Lion, all the database would need to be located in the user’s Containers folder. To reduce the inconvenience to our users, when you first run the app in OS X Lion, the app would move the database into the sandbox container. You could still Backup and Restore the database to an external folder.

Before all these get too confusing, what this means to our users is that we can no longer implement the “Save In Directory” option as the permission to save to that folder would no longer be granted to the apps without having the user re-select that folder. So for our Lion users, this means that you will need to reselect the “Save In Directory” before you hit the “Process All” button. For CM Note Keeper, it means that the “Auto Save” option would no longer work. We understand your frustration but we will certainly monitor the development from Apple and once they allow us to handle this as it was, we will definitely implement it.

We have submitted all our apps with the said Sandboxing requirement ahead of November 2011. This will allow us to refine the apps along the way so that the transition would be transparent to our customers.

We understand that these changes brings about issues to our users and we apologized for the inconvenience caused as we understand the number of negative reviews left on the App Store. We will be addressing them as soon as we can. If you do encounter any issues, please drop us an email and we will have the issue fixed.

Thank you once again for your patience.