When Apple introduced the iPhone it was a very cool touchscreen iPod that could make phone calls, and iPhoneOS was a piece of software to make it happen, but by the iPad’s release, the focus was on iOS, the touchscreen platform complete with a record shop, a video rental store, an enormous software development community and a version of Angry Birds for every day of the year.
I saw the iPad era rebranding of iPhoneOS to iOS as tying up typographical loose ends, but I missed the point. Far more of concern is the drift of macOS towards the locked down model of iOS. LaTeX is ubiquitous in the academic world for document creation, and Apple will lose a lot of customers like this. Certainly there is no way to adapt Texpad to comply with the Sandbox, but more worryingly it is unlikely any LaTeX editor could ever operate satisfactorily from within the Sandbox. As of 1st June the Mac App Store will not accept new applications or updates to existing applications that are incompatible with the Sandbox, and it is not unreasonable to assume that noncompliant applications will eventually be dropped completely. In cases such as Texpad those shackles prevent the application from doing its job. It reduces the damage any one application can do to your system, but it does so by limiting the access of that application to the filesystem. The Sandbox is a permissions system for macOS inherited from iOS. In fact it will be the end of the road for any products interacting with the LaTeX typesetting system.
We have had great fun reinventing the LaTeX front end and smoothing over LaTeX’s wrinkles for users, but our job is unfinished and unless Apple reverse their sandboxing policy, our adventure will soon end. Six months ago we released Texpad, an macOS LaTeX editor into the App Store, and we have been developing it ever since.
TEXPAD BIBTEX DOWNLOAD
Existing users will also be provided with a way to download future updates directly from our website. Having invested a lot of time in revamping it recently, we have firm plans to continue selling it through our own web store in the event that Apple remove Texpad from the App Store in 2013. Let me assure you that that’s not the case. EDIT: We’re not abandoning Texpad! It seems that some customers are under the impression that we don’t intend to work on or sell Texpad beyond June this year.
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