Mac App Store is here: our first impressions
So the Mac App Store has been with us for 2 days now. We've installed it without problems as part of the 10.6.6 update, however we spoken to others who haven't had such luck with them having to reboot a few times to get rid of 'Error 100'. Not a great start for an Apple product.
Here it is nonetheless. An App Store icon is added to the Dock for you to the right of the Finder icon, giving it a prominent position. So whether you like it or not it's in your face and ready to use! I suspect the average will not mind purely out of intrigue, especially as that App Store icon looks rather similar to to that gateway to Angry Birds on their iPhone and iPod Touch.
So diving in I found the initial first launch of the App Store was a little slow. It has since then cached all the entries and is a lot quicker with it.
So what is it like to use? Well no surprises here, it's pretty straightforward. Just like the iTunes Store there is a featured section, app categories and Charts of the top paid and of course free apps.
As it's separate to the iTunes Store you have to re-enter your Apple ID (you do have one, don't you?) even in order to get the free stuff. This is the same deal as with the iTunes Store though. In fact recently we have had friends who are first timers to iTunes scared that they have to enter payment details even for free apps. Now they have I'm sure they'll appreciate how easy it is to download and buy.
So I've downloaded a few of the free most popular apps, including Twitter (a marginally freshened up version of our favourite Mac Twitter client, Tweetie) which is the official Twitter App for the Mac and shares a cosmetic look with the lovely Twitter for iPad app. When you click to download there is a nice animation of the app's icon flying from the App Store into your doc:
Progress Bar: Rather Nice
It has to be said that this is both very easy and rather smart to watch - i.e. very Apple. For a new user it certainly beats working out how to mount and then unmount a DMG file.
So Twitter was the first app I downloaded. Soundcloud was the second, then the brilliant Caffeine (which I already had anyway but have replaced with an App Store version). All of which end up in the Dock. Which could get interesting if you carry on buying all of iWork and iLife, plus a few games. It's going to get busy in there! Apple have obviously thought it's better to add everything to the Dock so that it seems visible rather than people wondering if the purchase has worked. You can then rearrange or organise it yourself later.
So how about the range & quality of the Apps on the store? Well it's early days but its clear that some developers wont be on their as they cannot offer free demo versions or there programmes wont comply with the submission rules of the App Store. Rogue Ameoba, the maker of Audio Hijack Pro and the rather neat Fission audio editor, put their thoughts down on their blog. Other developers won't be overjoyed at the idea of handing 30% of their sale to Apple either.
But what if your after a free app? Well it should be a great shop window, however big hitters like Google Chrome, Firefox, AdiumX and VLC (all of which are essential OS X downloads) aren't in there.
Nor yet are Microsoft's labours or Adobe's.
So its time for a blogging cliche annoyingly: time will only tell. We'll have to wait and see if our favourite free Open Source apps get in there and whether the big rival companies sacrifice some profit for a better show window.
It's not all bad though, just look how much cheaper Aperture is now...
