DMI 2.x for Mountain Lion – no go.

Our Company / September 28, 2012 / Alykhan Jetha

If you have been keeping tabs on our Mountain Lion compatibility page, you know that we have tried to make DMI (Daylite Mail Integration for Daylite 3) work on Mountain Lion. Unfortunately, after several attempts, we have been unable to get DMI to work on Mountain Lion. This is due to a combination of the fact that we used Apple’s ‘Distributed Objects‘ (which we architected everything around) as our communication mechanism and the fact that Apple Mail is now “Sandboxed” for security on Mountain Lion.

We’ve been using the DMI code base since Mac OS X 10.3 and have offered free updates for Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7. Unfortunately, in 10.8, that code base just doesn’t work anymore because of sandboxing.
You can see that a number of developers are being affected by sandboxing here, here and here (these refer to the Mac App Store, but the issue is the same – constraints imposed by sandboxing since Mail is sandboxed and we cannot ask for entitlement changes).

We really thought that this last technique we tried would work, but unfortunately it didn’t and we are out of options other than a major rewrite.

Fortunately, DMA (Daylite Mail Assistant for Daylite 4) is a rewrite and it works on both Lion (10.7) and Mountain Lion (10.8). We used a different integration technique that gives us more options.

I realize that this news is going to cause pain to our existing Daylite 3 users who want to upgrade to Mountain Lion and still stay on Daylite 3 (with DMI) for a while. And for that, I sincerely apologize. All I can say to these users is that you’ll need to stick to Lion (or older) and plan for your eventual upgrade to Daylite 4. Development on Daylite 4 has been agressive and I hope we can share some of these developments with you soon.

Keep in mind that Daylite 3.15.2, which will be out soon (beta available), will work fine on Mountain Lion with the exception of DMI.

If you’d like to discuss your upgrade concerns with us, please send us an email.

For better or for worse, we are all in the Apple ecosystem and Apple waits for no one and doesn’t like to carry baggage. They jettison technology that doesn’t work which allows them to move forward unlike any other before them. It causes significant difficulties for developers like us (big native apps) and our users, but in the grand scheme of things, I think it’s the right thing to do as long as they are not too aggressive.

Until next time…
AJ

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