Need to provide a "you disabled AppleScript access" notification

[ewhitley]

StatTag cannot work without AppleScript access. Given the user is prompted precisely once and never again, it's difficult to let the user know they can't really use StatTag once they've denied access.

We need to do something where we detect the privilege has been denied and then provide some sort of help dialogue to let them know what they need to do (similarly to how BBEdit does it). We cannot intervene at all on their behalf.

http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/ODBAutomationError.html

[ewhitley]

Not sure of the best path to test this. Should we just try writing a fake Apple Event to see if it runs? https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/107546

[ewhitley]

Still investigating, but after a lot of searching it looks like 10.14 does have an API to check for Apple Events being enabled for a target app

https://www.felix-schwarz.org/blog/2018/08/new-apple-event-apis-in-macos-mojave

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreservices/3025784-aedeterminepermissiontoautomatet

Sounds like it may be buggy https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/666528

We'll have to check the OS target. This is a 10.14+ only API. https://halmueller.wordpress.com/2018/09/04/privacy-consent-in-mojave-part-2-applescript/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52504462/because-it-is-not-sip-protected-apple-event-error-in-macos-mojave

Nice extended discussion about the issues here (pre formal 10.14 release) https://www.felix-schwarz.org/blog/2018/06/apple-event-sandboxing-in-macos-mojave

[ewhitley]

Really good sample project from one of the articles listed above

https://github.com/Panopto/test-mac-privacy-consent

Also demos how to (potentially) direct the user to the privacy settings in the OS

[[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?Privacy_Automation"]];

Note that we cannot check script access status unless the target app is running. That's going to get ugly since we may want to call to the app to launch it. We'll have to check to see if the target bundle ID is running first?

[ewhitley]

Initial version committed. Modified from approach on https://github.com/Panopto/test-mac-privacy-consent

[ewhitley]

Interesting. Re: app store, Microsoft apparently got exemptions to be able to use the older style entitlements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18992088

Specifically -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18995754