The Mac App Store isn’t for today’s Mac developers
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marco.org
I'll be one of the first in line to get on the Mac App Store when I've never before developed or sold software since this month. It is making is so darn easy to have a chance.
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/archives/1074
The roadmap indicates mac support should be ready this release cycle (0.95), but it probably won't stabilize until 0.96. Once finished, porting games written with Cocos2d between iOS and Mac should be trivial, allowing for differences in input.
If anyone is interested in learning more about Cocos2d iPhone, I've started a tutorial series for people with little or no programming experience:
It's not finished, but I think it provides a good introduction to the basic concepts.
Prepare to be disappointed. Technology stacks aside, if the interaction models between desktop apps and multi-touch interfaces were in any way relatable, UIKit wouldn't have been invented.
If you want to write a Mac app for the new store, you'll be using AppKit.
Some games might make the transition relatively easily. A game that relies mostly on single points of touch has a somewhat decent analog with the mouse, but only if it relies on certain patterns of finger movement. A game that, for instance, involves alternating taps on opposite sides of the screen, would translate badly—it's nowhere near as easy to leap that distance precisely with a mouse as it is with your fingers. Can you imagine playing the iPhone classic Dactyl with a mouse?
That kind of difference is present all over in touch-based applications, in differing amounts. It's up to the developer to find what transitions well and what doesn't, but in most cases it won't be a trivial task.
It sometimes seems as though, as a consequence of all the strides made in bringing more serious OS support, better languages and much more coherent UI work to mobile phones in the last few years, many programmers have lost sight of the fact that these are still relatively low-powered embedded devices.
A macApp is less sharable than an emailed website link. Besides my dog who am I going annoy with my Vuvuzela? (so to speak).
I suspect that macApps will sell based on utility rather than entertainment and that the removal of flash and java are expected to generate much of the initial need.
This is an area where the Mac has been weak for more than a decade. Imagine an environment that allows you to purchase a multiplayer networked version of Civilization: Revolutions (or Quake or Plants vs Zombies or a dungeon crawler version of Dragon Age) for $20 and you can play it while sitting at your desk, on the couch with your iPad or out in the world on your phone.
Given the popularity of cheap apps and casual gaming, I expect the App Store turns into a Jobsian version of Steam.
An issue with the iPad and iPhone for serious gaming is that unlike a wii controller, neither is replaceable for $25 after an over enthusiastic gaming session (durability in general is also an issue).
From a business standpoint, I'm not sure how well games fit into Apple's strategy. The market for sophisticated games is mature and growth would mostly come from capturing increasing market share rather than an expanding market and small games are easily delivered to the desktop via the web. The life cycle of a game is also much longer than a movie.
One addendum, though: Existing applications won't benefit from the App Store, yes. Existing Mac developers, though, probably will. If you know Cocoa forwards and backwards, then making little (store-exclusive!) apps isn't challenging, but potentially lucrative.
Traditional Mac developers (Panic, Omni, etc.) will obviously move their apps onto the store, but I don't think we'll see a whole lot of new entries--most iOS apps don't neatly transition onto the desktop, besides some games. I know my couple iOS applications don't have an obvious Mac version, just as my Mac applications didn't have an obvious iOS version. If the Mac App Store is to reach anywhere near the popularity of the iOS App Store, it's going to take a long time for companies to decide that the desktop is even worth it.
Hosting costs aren't going to go away, you will still need a web site, you might be able to save a little download bandwidth but that hardly breaks the bank nowadays.
I don't think Apple are being greedy, I'm sure that is a reasonable reflection of their costs, I just wonder how it will add up for developers like Panic or Omnigroup. If their volumes double then it makes sense, if they only increase slightly or not at all then it doesn't.
But that isn't really what you're paying Apple for. You're paying them for the creation of a new market that may (or may not) be better for you. Discovery (formerly marketing) is going to largely be their thing. Customer education will become standardized. Trust - they will teach people that apps are safe and hassle free to install & uninstall. They will teach consumers what an app is.
This will probably amount to far more then an increase/decrease in sales. It will determine which apps succeed and fail. These will be different from the winners and losers in the existing, "natural" market. It will determine aggregate demand for apps. This will also be different. It will affect consumers' expectation for what an app should be. For example, I think that learning curves will need to be reduced. The concept of learning software will be reduced.
A lot of existing software (the big names: MS Office, Adobe CS, etc come to mind immediately) probably won't fit into the app mold comfortably. Developers will have strong incentive to create apps that do. It will be interesting how much software can be "apps."
You can gift someone an album on the iTunes Store. When you buy a DVD the DVD can "gift" you the iTunes version of the movie (The Dark Knight did this, though it just copied over from the disk). Why can't a software company gift someone an app on the Mac App Store when they buy the app elsewhere?
EDIT: What I don't understand is why there's a need to do so anyway. If I recall correctly, there's no such thing for Steam, and game developers have long sold applications both in retail and via Steam with no problem. Supporting two separate applications (one with the traditional purchase and one via the App Store) shouldn't be too difficult, especially if the developer switches over to App Store-exclusive when it hits. He'll simply have to continue to perform upgrades/support however they were before, but will be able to ditch their old payment processing entirely.
...of which you get 70% back if you're gifting people your own product. So it really costs you 30%.
Apple has decided to go more in the user-centered direction then the developer-centered direction. This is definitely the right move for them. However it makes me a little sad, its the end of an error. Now I see linux as the developer centered OS with OS X as the most user-centered OS. Its a hard call to make.
Mostly I think I am harboring some resentment. "Back in my day we had to write our own licensing code, host a web payment code, and host autoupdates. All the kids these days do is launch the darn app." I think I almost believe its not fair.
I guess at the age of 24, I am running into one of the first big changes that I have to accept if I want to stay relevant. I knew this market changed quick, I just always assumed it would be in the way that I wanted it to change.
Are you British? :P
And there's probably a lot of overlap in fact. If iOS is the client, I think it's a pretty good bet Linux is the server.
If anything, the creation of yet another possible revenue channel only makes the OS more friendly to me, not less.
"Back in my day, we had to roll our own blitter if we wanted to do anything serious" could also be said, but that doesn't mean modern graphics libraries and hardware are less developer friendly. Eliminating the need to do repetitive grunt-work is always a good thing.
- Apple decides which apps go and which don't.
- I have to read a list of rules to know if I can actually sell my application
- Apple takes 30% of my money.
- Apple decides what programming language I can use.
I thought it was agreed upon that the app store is not overall good for developers.
An App Store isn't that great for developers (in the "developers being free to do whatever they want" sense of "good for developers") when it's the only option available.
That is not the case with the Mac App Store. If you don't find any benefits in the tradeoffs that particular option provides, don't pursue it. Write your "own licensing code, host a web payment code, and host autoupdates" like the "good old days", if that's what floats your boat. But it's still better to have another revenue option at your disposal than to not, even if you don't choose to use it.
I keep hearing this, but I've yet to be convinced.
Over the last 5-10 years Apple has pushed developers more and more aggressively. They put giant efforts into things like Classic and Rosetta, only to strip them from the OS entirely a few years later. They repeatedly trumpeted the full equivalence of Carbon and Java to Cocoa, and now it's infeasible to use either as the basis for any full-featured application. They developed all kinds of new APIs for QuickTime in 10.5, and then in 10.6 introduced "QuickTime X" as the only 64-bit native solution, effectively deprecating everything else. And most recently there's this unusual attack on the Flash plugin of all things. It's as if they now revel in actively destroying backwards-compatibility.
All of these decisions had the effect of reducing Apple's support and maintenance overhead while strengthening their control over the direction of their platform.
I would be surprised if Apple's very clearly demonstrated zeal for taking control and eliminating developer options did not extend to the new Mac App store.
The known facts about the Mac App Store are that it is only going to be an additional way to obtain software. It doesn't make sense to condemn it as "Bad For Developers" based on groundless speculation and presumed irrationality on Apple's part.
So let's look at it logically then. In nearly every example I gave, did or did Apple not make a promise to developers which it then broke later, costing those developers time and revenue?
And did or did Apple not recently make a promise to developers regarding the availability of an existing, long-standing technological alternative, that being direct downloads of application binaries?
Would a reasonable person extrapolate from those past observations that Apple would behave in a similar manner when circumstances similar to those that I mentioned arose?
If not, then either you don't believe that people's future actions have anything to do with their past actions, or you disagree with a series of easily verifiable facts.
apple has always been that way, making life harder for developers if it suits what they perceive the consumer's needs to be.
Yup, plus the effect of improving user experience.
The most developer-friendly thing a platform vendor can do is attract users. Apple's done that in spades.
a) support the legacy systems forever. b) don't support them at all.
Option A leads to a Windows-esque environment where support for older platforms actively holds back development and innovation for newer ones. Option B kills everyone's existing apps. Neither of those sounds like a very developer-friendly or even user-friendly option.
Frankly, the fact that they built those at all shows that they're willing to go the extra mile to make sure that their developers have the heads up to upgrade their applications before breaking them entirely.