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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon objective-see

Make Rules more accessible

Open luckman212 opened this issue 3 years ago • 6 comments

Since the Rules editor and the mode/update check/prefs window both seem to share the same controlling process (BlockBlock Helper.app) I wonder if you'd considered putting a Rules button in the toolbar:

image

This would make it easier to get to than hunting for a (possibly invisible) menubar item. It would be especially helpful since the helper app can be launched directly from Spotlight... image

luckman212 avatar Oct 31 '20 19:10 luckman212

@objective-see I also noticed the rules are stored in a binary plist

/Library/Objective-See/BlockBlock/rules.plist

I wonder about being able to back up and restore rules, or distribute default rules among several Macs. Is it possible to parse this file in any meaningful way?

plutil -p /Library/Objective-See/BlockBlock/rules.plist is not safe for humans

luckman212 avatar Nov 05 '20 20:11 luckman212

@pwardle Is there a better or more preferred way to ask questions like this about your tools? A public forum etc? I just want to make sure you've seen them (also #18 and #20)

& Thank you 🙏

luckman212 avatar Dec 09 '20 22:12 luckman212

@objective-see seems this is coming up again in #27

luckman212 avatar Apr 15 '21 18:04 luckman212

Aloha @luckman212

I've added "View Rules" button to the main preferences pane: Screen Shot 2021-04-17 at 10 16 24 PM

...this is (now) similar to other Obj-See's tools (e.g. LuLu), and hopefully make accessing the rules simpler.

In terms of the rules file, for efficiency reasons its contains serialized Rule objects (that can be directly loaded back into initialized Rules objects when BlockBlock (re)loads, etc). I do understand that the downside to this approach is its not human readable per se. However at this point, that's probably not going to change (as that would mean having to support multiple rule file formats ...which would be rather a PITA).

objective-see avatar Apr 18 '21 08:04 objective-see

@objective-see Thanks, I will check it out now that 2.x is out. I stopped using BlockBlock for a bit in between when 1.x went stagnant and Big Sur came out.

As for the rules format & efficiency, I understand what you're saying to the extent that my pea-sized brain allows.

But what about adding an Export/Import function so at least we could back up our rules or replicate them among groups of machines? Would that be impossible?

luckman212 avatar Apr 18 '21 16:04 luckman212

@objective-see Hello again, since 2.0.5 came out (thanks) I'm using BlockBlock again

Any thoughts on this? I would really love to keep my rules in sync among several Macs.

luckman212 avatar Nov 07 '21 19:11 luckman212