09.11.07
New identity selector packages for Mac now available
My fellow Bandit Andy Hodgkinson is not a prolific blogger. So far he’s averaging one post every 1.25 years or so. But his post today will interest a lot of people.
Earlier this year we showed a version of an open source identity selector running on Linux and the Mac. It was announced with the name DigitalMe, and we donated the code to the Higgins project, where it is affectionately referred to as “the Higgins H2 Native Identity Agent”. But there were some problems. Even though the selector works fine for me on OpenSUSE Linux 10.2 and sports a lovely GTK UI, the Mac UI was a port and it required too many dependencies to install easily. It really needed to have a native Mac OS X UI. So Andy and Jim Norman set about this summer to learn Objective C and write a Cocoa UI, in addition to enhancing the selector interoperability and their regular jobs. And it needed to be conveniently packaged for Mac users, so Andy fixed that too.
Last Friday, Andy quietly posted the Mac binary packages. Drag and drop install. We have tested it with many relying parties and identity provider sites (many more than those linked). We have also notified a few interested power users and got some initial feedback. It’s looking good so far.
So if you’d like to run an easily installed, 100% open source package for OpenSUSE 10.2 or Mac OS X, you can get from the Bandit instructions and download page.
It’s shiny and new, and just might work. Please let us know how it works for you!
I've done a variety of things in my career, but always seem to
return to issues of identity and technology. Most of what's written
here will be about such things. I work for Novell, but this is my
personal blog. The views expressed on here are mine alone and do not
necessarily represent the position of my employer.
Pat Patterson said,
September 11, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Yay - I’m here. There seems to be a lot of clicking into the identity selector to get here, though. ‘Save Password’ doesn’t seem to work in DigitalMe - I guess it’s ‘not yet implemented’
Dale Olds said,
September 12, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Hey Pat! Thanks for using DigitalMe, and I’m glad it somewhat worked for you. I agree there’s a lot of clicking around the first time to leave a comment — I need to work in my page flow a bit. I’ll get around to fixing it one of these days.
As for the “Save Password” issue, you are correct that it’s not implemented yet. However, it’s open source and with your coding skills I’m sure you could fix it in no time. Want to help?
IdentityBlog - Digital Identity, Privacy, and the Internet's Missing Identity Layer said,
September 17, 2007 at 1:37 pm
[...] Dale Olds writes: Last Friday, Andy quietly posted the Mac binary packages. Drag and drop install. We have tested it with many relying parties and identity provider sites (many more than those linked). We have also notified a few interested power users and got some initial feedback. It’s looking good so far. [...]
A Good Step, But a Small One « Identity Blogger said,
September 18, 2007 at 6:54 pm
[...] There is some attention being given to the new Bandit InfoCard Selector for the Mac. Phil Windley, Dale Olds, and Kim Cameron give their thoughts on this. As a non-Mac user I can’t get very excited about [...]
NOVELL: Novell Open PR » Blog Archive » DigitalMe takes a bite out of the Apple said,
September 19, 2007 at 8:32 am
[...] explains this better than I could, so check out his posting here. While you are there, also read his posting on the one true identity system that he wants and is [...]