I believe strongly that we need to work on making text more richly interactive since the written word is a fundamental unit of knowledge, so the richer we interact with our text the richer we interact with our knowledge.

More richly interactive text interactions will require a more interactive environment where the different capabilities of the system can be brought to bear in the most convenient ways, creating a more powerful user experience and thus a more powerful user.

Apple’s policy of sandboxing is understandable from a security point of view, but it goes against this idea completely.

The term sandbox used to mean children’s play area, a constrained area for action where the participants needed to be controlled and the definition in computer security is very much related: “… a sandbox is a security mechanism for separating running programs. It is often used to execute untested code, or untrusted programs from unverified third-parties, suppliers, untrusted users and untrusted websites.” Wikipedia.

The need for greater security is understandable and the need for greater interaction is important. How can these two goals be reconciled?

I propose Apple establishes a service which could be called a Trusted Developer Program, where developers (us), can provide Apple with our source code and verify our identity. We can then interact with the system and other applications in a richer way than if Apple knows nothing about us. I don’t even mind paying Apple a small up-front fee for this and a slightly larger cut from App Store revenues.

Please tell me what you think, I would really appreciate your perspective on this.