Lots of thoughtful posts are cropping up about the new restrictions Apple plans to implement for OS X applications that will be distributed through the App Store. The occasion is, I suppose, the news that Apple is pushing back the deadline for all applications distributed through the App Store to be Sandbox-compliant from the middle of this month to March 2012.

For a basic rundown of the new rules and what they mean, check out this post from Pauli Olavi Ojala.

For an argument that Apple could take a more realistic, less restrictive approach to securing applications, see Will Shipley. In it, he explains why entitlements and code auditing may be useful in theory, but certificates are a more straightforward solution:

But, in the real world, security exploits get discovered by users or researchers outside of Apple, and what’s important is having a fast response to security holes as they are discovered. Certificates give Apple this.

His proposed solution makes a lot of sense, I’d love to see Apple adopt it.

Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop blog has a useful post on the sandbox features in OS X Lion as well.