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!