Why SIMBL plugins don't seem to work with TextEdit and Preview in Lion?

Question

I'm developing a SIMBL plugin that will run in any application (I'm on Lion 10.7.4). It works fine with most of them (including Apple apps like Finder, Safari or Terminal), but TextEdit and Preview don't seem to play well. I'm not sure it is relevant to the situation, but I get this error when I try to launch TextEdit or Preview with my plugin :

03/06/2012 16:14:02,096 SIMBL Agent: eventDidFail:'tvea' error:Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-1708 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (OSStatus error -1708.)" (the AppleEvent was not handled by any handler ) UserInfo=0x4009788e0 {ErrorNumber=-1708} userInfo:{
     ErrorNumber = -1708;
}

I also noticed that SizeWell developers had trouble with TextEdit and Preview (see their release notes), but couldn't find any reason why it didn't work. Any idea on this ?

If you need additional info, don't hesitate to ask !

Answer 1

It's almost certainly related to the fact that TextEdit and Preview are both sandboxed. It looks as though this is a known limitation of SIMBL, and that some extensions, such as Afloat, have worked around it: http://infinite-labs.net/kb/afloat/af-lion.html