Mac App Store: Open for Business
apple.com
apple.com
Why does Apple now have three different window control styles? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20635/Screenshots/r3da.png
Why are there back buttons ("like a browser") but you can't click hold to get the contextual drop down?
The navigation (Featured, Top Charts, etc) are so far away from the other controls (Back and Forward) its insanely awkward to use.
It feels kind of ... weird using an app store on my Mac. I guess because I'm fortunate in that I know where to look for Mac applications, I don't really have the burning need for a central place.
luckily it's only needed for music...
...oh wait
iDevice syncing is full of unhandled corner cases which lead to crashes, inconsistent state, nonsense error messages, or lost data. It's also really easy to accidentally delete stuff off your device if you don't have the same data locally. I probably get the short end of the stick for being a developer: iTunes and XCode have a kind of love-hate relationship. That's far from the only source of problems though, I've seen all kinds of weirdness outside the context of iOS development.
Even outside of this, there are some embarrassing hiccups, e.g.:
- The UI becomes extremely unresponsive while importing media - it seems the import runs in the UI thread, or otherwise causes the UI thread to block.
- If you're editing metadata for a file while it's playing, there's a brief pause while saving.
There's no excuse for either of those, and seem the sort of thing a decent programmer with knowledge of the codebase could fix in a day or so. (I'm aware that ID3v2 is typically stored at the start of the file and requires the whole file to be rewritten; notifying the streaming playback thread of the byte offset shift and new file descriptor is however not rocket science)
(Well, maybe the music store. But device management and syncing makes no sense.)
Lack of auto conversion support when transferring to devices.
"Genius" Playlists never work for anything obscure
Ping is terrible
Lack of tagging support (no autotag feature)
I use mediamonkey (i'm on PC), once you switch you can never go back. I can organize my collection exactly how I want it from in the software, i can browse my harddrives to preview music before I add to my library. It supports pretty much every codec under the sun AND will convert it to compatible versions for whatever device i'm syncing to.
There is also a plugin for discogs tagging support (one of the best online discographies in the world), a plug in for "autodj" (based off last.fm).
I realize that not everyone in the world is as anal about organizing music as I am, but for the job, itunes can't compete.
For example, the following smart playlists: - Top 100 highly rated songs that haven't been played in a month - Five random Simpsons episodes (hooray bus entertainment) - Unrated songs - Highly rated songs from the 90s - etc.
My wife and I use frontrow (just a skin over iTunes really) to manage our media library: dozens of movies, hundreds of tv shows, thousands and thousands of songs. Couldn't be happier with it.
Just make everything directories and let the power users do what they want. Just don't do that in the mainstream app. Keep stuff like that in the power user's special app.
I really wish VLC had this kind of thing. I know there's an add-ons type architecture, but I've never seen anything for it to handle libraries, sadly. Does anyone know of anything like this, or anyone working on this? I'd be quite happy to donate funds to encourage its development.
As a side note, for folks looking for a lightweight Windows alternative, foobar2000 has been wonderful for me. Low memory usage, extremely customizable UI but sensible defaults, extensible, and automatically adds files with no hassle or slowdown.
I have it set up on my Mac Mini (connected via HDMI), and I can remote control it with the Apple Remote, but there's also an iPhone/iPad app that can both remote control (up, down, select, back), remote browse (tap on a movie or TV episode to watch it on the TV), and stream (tap on a movie to watch it on your iPhone/iPad).
It also has the nice feature of being able to automatically find any other Plex instances on the local network and automatically stream from them as if the media were local. That way, you can connect Plex to your media centre in the basement, but watch the data anywhere in the house (e.g. on a smaller TV in the bedroom or an iMac in the office).
It's really a great ecosystem, and if their partnership with LG[1] pans out, it might get that much better.
1. http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/03/plex-announces-paternship...
This is an excellent point. If I write network clients in elisp just for yuks, I'm probably not Apple's target user for iTunes. Emacs' UI has broken my brain (and hurt my fingers.)
I did just move to an SSD over Christmas though, and must say it is significantly better now - especially noticeable is I no longer seem to be getting beach balls during iPhone syncing.
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1
Why does Apple now have three different window control
styles? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20635/Screenshots/r3da.png
Why are there back buttons ("like a browser") but you can't
right hand click to get the contextual drop down?
The navigation (Featured, Top Charts, etc) are so far away from the
other controls (Back and Forward) its insanely awkward to use.
Only three? That makes very consistent interface then.
Back buttons are there, you know, to get back. Very common usage pattern.
Contextual drop down? Not that common. Even Safari does not have it. Neither does Opera on OS X.
Jus like on every web page? Does not cause much trouble though.
Lets compare Safari to App Store in terms of distance...
It does. Try it. Click and hold.
Apparently not common enough to warrant having a back button on the iPhone.
Back buttons are there, you know, to get back. Very common usage pattern. Contextual drop down? Not that common. Even Safari does not have it. Neither does Opera on OS X.
Contextual drop down? Not that common.
Even Safari does not have it.
what do you mean by "alley or calico"? sorry, but google isn't helping me here...
Supporting old OS by Apple: of course they want you to upgrade, to profit.
I would not say that's because Apple is brave, it makes business sense.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, because I don't have the figures to back this up, but I'd imagine most of Apple's revenue from Macs comes from the home, rather than a business environment. It's easier to convince a home user to upgrade to the latest and shiniest version than it is to convince a cautious and conservative IT department.
not necessarily. MSFT doesn't make PCs, unlike AAPL.
I was given a free 2008 MacBook 13" in colledge. It came with Mac OS 10.5.2 installed, which couldn't run some new programs, so I did an update and it updated to 10.5.8 which solved all my problems so far. Are you supposed do buy an OS upgrade? Or buy a new Mac?
Upgrades are easy and preserve all your stuff. No need to format or anything.
Of course you can buy a new Mac too.
My little landscape generator app, Turtledoveland, is currently at #5 on the Top Paid list for the Graphics & Design category.
I'll be sure to let HN know what kind of sales numbers that actually means, once the numbers come in...
Apple is strictly enforcing that rule, too. My app was at first rejected for violating it. The specific reason given was: The application is creating files or writing to </Library/Preferences/com.apple.mediaio.DeviceSettings.plist> and <~/Library/Images>
It turns out that my app had nothing to do with this -- the responsible party was the IKPictureTaker class in ImageKit, which I was using to provide the "take a photo" functionality.
To Apple's credit, they made it very easy to email a real person about the rejection. When I explained that ImageKit is responsible, the rejection was rescinded within a day.
I hope you make just bucket loads of cash. However, I wouldn't call it pretty bold. I would call it "fucking obnoxious." (Also, and totally off-topic, why does Apple keep insisting that I restart my damn machines for dinky-ass upgrades like this?)
We're always very open with our numbers--I'll post initial results as soon as I have them. I shipped everything with our Blurst accounts for leaderboards/achievements/etc, so I should be able to infer some ballpark figures before official numbers tonight. Will post to http://technology.blurst.com and http://twitter.com/mwegner
I guess you are expected to drag apps to the trash like before? That sucks.
It's easy to understand this, once you realize that window management is app-centric and is organized by Application rather than individual windows but that's a subtle distinction most normal users will not understand on their own.
To compound things, for some apps,closing the window will actually quit the app. And for some, closing the window leaves the app still running in the dock but clicking the dock icon doesn't bring up.
Those few inconsistencies suck, though. Bad apps, what are you going to do? Well, you could reject them from a store...
If it wasn't for Windows confusing people by conflating windows with applications, I suspect most people's mothers wouldn't have a problem with it.
EDIT: And if you're savvy, you can always manage memory manually and quit from the top menu or from the Dock.
I wonder if the inexperienced user understands that for installing you need to provide the apple store password, but for uninstalling, you need to provide the admin password of your machine.
(And I say this as someone who likes Mac OS X almost entirely because of its Unix underpinnings)
I use virtual desktops constantly in Linux, but have abandoned Spaces when on the Mac. I haven't really taken the time to distill what isn't 'right' about Spaces, so I'd be curious to hear what others think are the problems with it.
The second, less severe issue is that it will yank you between desktops 3 or 4 times for unclear reasons. It's sort of as if someone else is controlling the desktop switching and they just want to annoy the crap out of you.
FWIW, I used Desktop Linux/BSD for ~8 years before going to OSX, so maybe I have just been spoiled by a very old (eg, well debugged) virtual desktop implementation in X11.
I get that he hates the desktop metaphor, but it still needs to be improved. Little things like the cube metaphor & wobbly windows go a long way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard
Longtime UNIX users are not Apple's primary customer base.
If your code isn't proprietary, you don't need that :D
I don't know about you, but even 50€ is a lot of money for me, and I'd like to try the app first and buy it only if I find it useful. And I suspect that the average Joe will not know how to find the demo version on the internet.
Probably because it's version 1.0
http://dolinsky.tumblr.com/post/2623950787/sour-apple-app-st...
Users don't want to search through multiple websites, use paypal and drag icons into the application folder.
You will be disappointed - users will love this.
Then if you want the trust that the verification of apple gives you, you should make sure you only download software from apple.com, but the whole system is still more open and accessible by being online on websites rather than specific to a piece of software running on OSX.
I don't trust you that your website isn't spam.
I don't trust you with my credit card number.
I don't trust you that your program is well made and follows conventions.
I don't trust you that you won't install a Trojan on my machine.
I don't trust you that you won't put Adware all over.
I don't trust you that your app is bug free and won't ruin the performance on my computer.
But if Apple accepts your app into the app store, I don't have to worry about these things.
Personally, I say I hate malls myself, yet once in a while I get the urge to go and buy a few things I didn't know I needed. I find comfort in the consistency of the stores, that you can go to any mall and find roughly the same vendors. Once at the mall, my choices are narrowed down (which ties into the whole Paradox of Choice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...).
I don't think that's an accurate comparison because:
1. the Virgin Megastore doesn't get 30% of the revenue from the independents.
2. the Virgin Megastore doesn't get copies of the customer lists and sales records of the independents.
3. the Virgin Megastore can't slap their logo on everything in the independents' stores.
4. the Virgin Megastore cannot easily create their own competing versions of the independents merchandise.
This morning's productivity is probably blown...
For me the main selling point of the centralized app store is that you get all updates in a single place instead of having each app spawn it's own update mechanism.
EDIT: Sarcasm.... ;)
For now. I'm willing to bet any amount that in 5 years (most likely a lot sooner) this will be the only "legal" way to install software on your Mac (and you'll probably need to jailbreak your Mac to install apps through command line or something).
In another 5 years or so, Windows will follow.
Phones and tablets went that way because they're new devices that weren't already entrenched in people's daily lives, and they're complementary to your primary machine. The fact that they're locked down is a dealbreaker for many, but it doesn't imply a wholesale ship-jumping like locking down a desktop would.
[Edited to clarify that I wasn't talking about the platform developers would target, but would themselves use].
Yes, iPhones and such are locked down. That's the difference between iPhones and Macs.
While I certainly appreciate Apple, for coming out with a central place for installing applications, this is what I absolutely don't want.
Doesn't sound like auto-update though.
Here's why you're wrong:
Unlike Linux, Mac OS X ships with a standard, stable, and exceptionally complete set of libraries. Apple goes to great lengths to maintain binary and API compatibility, and this means a few things:
- Most applications will only require Apple-supplied libraries, as there's very little that isn't provided by the OS libraries.
- Apple keeps the OS libraries up-to-date.
This feature-complete ABI/API-stable environment is not free for Apple to provide -- it takes a lot of effort to provide a consistent API across libraries and maintain the API/ABI compatibility across releases, but the advantages are tremendous. Mac OS X has been able to skate by without package management for years because this approach allows for drag-install drag-uninstall application distribution.
UNIX derivatives, on the other hand, were faced with a lack of standardization of core application libraries, a huge number of incompatible libraries to fill in the gaps, and a software distribution model that involves splatting files all over the disk. The end result is that you need a packaging system to maintain security updates, manage all the files on disk, and upgrade the world in lockstep due to API/ABI compatibility issues across libraries shared by wildly disparate applications.
So -- tl;dr -- it's not a security 'nightmare' because the core libraries that everyone uses are already shared and updated by the OS vendor.
This is also what makes Mac OS X so much nicer to develop and distribute applications for as compared to platforms that require a centralized package manager authority to keep things sane.
Something else that helps with Apple's way of doing things is their reasonably slow release cycle (when compared to most Linux distributions).
The actual problem, from an app developer point of view is that you can't ensure that the lib behave exactly in the same way as on the developers system (and that may not just because of different versions but also because of different compiler settings etc). In many cases, the app developer also has some own patches inside some of the libraries to integrate them better into his application. It is often utopic to wait and hope to get those patches upstream.
programmes on the mac have the extension .app; it's roughly equivalent to .exe in Windows (except it's not a binary, more like a .jar). When the iPhone started, I guess 'App' was the natural name for them, and thus App Store came naturally as well.
Now it's come to the mac, it's makes even more sense, because it's back where it (Apps) started
Really? Why not? The iPhone is, after all, running a decedent of the NeXT codebase too.
I still like how I can switch between applications way more than I like switching between different sites or rather the tabs of one site. Any improvement on that area?
Yes, because it's vitally fucking important to interrupt my workflow everytime there's a new "Shit My Dad Says". God, I hate Growl sometimes.
untick the 'enabled' option for anything you don't want to bug you
I own both, and miss the "Places" and "Faces" features from Aperture in LightRoom. But given Aperture's deficiencies, I use LightRoom 95% of the time.
Nice little detail it knows whether you installed an application even if you didn't do it through the app store.
One interesting little thing though.
It seems like the different applications icons still need to catch up to the quality of the ios app icons.
Whereas on the iPhone the iAds and other ads are annoying, intrusive and flashy.
Microsoft Live Mesh and LogMeIn come to mind, but I'm sure there are others as well. They require some sort of plugin/Java/ActiveX/whatever, but hey so does video.
I run stuff offline pretty frequently. Online more frequently, but losing offline capabilities (especially in the face of links-as-apps) would be absolutely crippling for me.
Not that I doubt good WebStore apps will be capable of running completely offline. But that's certainly not the state of things right now, and the added programming complexity implies to me that it won't change very quickly.
fyi, i do not develop apps for apple. i gave my mac to my brother about a year ago. i figured that i could do the same with my cheap acer without worrying about dropping or losing it.
Steam Store also opened it's doors in 2002: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)
Is anybody else experiencing the same thing on non-US stores?
$99/year
Hm ..
And the new appstore doesn't stop anyone from hosting their OSS on github - even for Macs. The appstore is for the average user; github is for the better than average programmer.
Also it helps pay for the reviewing of apps, although they still take a loss on running the appstore, last I heard.
No need to imagine: http://www.android.com/market/
class UIComplaint(BikeShed.colorComplaint):
print("blah")edit: never mind, it is showing up now.
Apple treats it like a subscription. They want one click buying.
I am very deeply suspicious about the 'app-store' what if I purchase an application while I am here in the UK? Is it going to work when I get back to the USA - or will they force me to purchase it again the way they are attempting to do with my music?
Apple told me to just create a new iTunes account in the UK; this however has never allowed me to use my update my iPhone apps nor to listen to the music. So much for trying to do the right thing
I remain very suspect.
If you ignore iTunes, Apple doesn’t do kitchen sink apps. Their apps might not have razor sharp focus (you can do a lot of different stuff with iPhoto) but in general they stick to one theme (but everything in iPhoto has something to do with photos). I’m a fan of the hypothesis that the only reason iTunes does so many different things is that it has to run on Windows. Apple might not want to ship a few different apps for Windows, they might want to keep it all together. Apple might already have split iTunes into a few different apps if they only had to run on the Mac.
The App Store doesn’t run on Windows, it doesn’t have the same problem so Apple just reverted to their default non-kitchen-sink approach.
The App Store installs itself as the second-highest icon on your Dock, just after the Finder. That's an amazingly prominent placement.
Remember that most people will be getting the Mac App Store unwittingly as part of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update. If they didn't have a separate Dock icon for it, those people would never find out it exists.
>its amazing how apple expected customers to pay for the same digital product over and over.
Or are you trying to pretend you didn't say that?
Obviously false.
Although it is mildly amusing to watch your syntactical contortions, I'm out.
TL;DR: The world does not revolve around geeks.