10.6.6 and the Mac App Store launched yesterday, and already some post launch news out there about it.

Pixelmator (a Photoshop lite program for basic image manipulation) has already moved to an App Store only model. This might turn into my first paid app purchase through the store, as I've been hearing good things about it and missed out on one of the bundles it was in recently.

Also, lots of tabloid style headlines floating around about the store being cracked already. Seems in this particular case, it's trivial to pirate Angry Birds and some other apps, due to them failing to implement the proper checks in their app per the Apple store guidelines. Embedded into each app (including the free ones) is a receipt that contains the DRM piece indicating who bought the app and for what app the receipt is for. If someone copies the receipt from a free app into the Angry Birds app, it will run, as it only verifies a valid receipt is present. It doesn't check to make sure the receipt is for the Angry Birds app like it should.

For now, I've grabbed the Twitter client, and TextWrangler from the store. It's also recognizing my installed iWork 09 and iLife 09 apps, but I'm not sure if Apple will transition to releasing updates via the App Store, or continue to send me updates via the system Software Update utility. It doesn't show these in my purchased app list, so I still need to use the original media to install it on a new Mac.

Not sure why people are giving the Mac App Store grief because of that though especially since it hasn't actually been "hacked" in any fashion. It isn't the fault of Apple that the software vendors didn't follow the Apple guidelines.

I'll update my old Mac Mini in a bit and give it a whirl.

As a developer I still see a lot of problems with the store format and restrictions. Being able to (actually allowed to) install on "any Mac you control" for non-commercial purposes is very ambiguous. It also means that you should still keep a non-store version of your App. I've seen two companies, the guys behind Pixelmater included, that have gone App Store-only.

If I'm the tech/IT guy at a local college, it's a non-commercial setting. Am I allowed to buy Keynote or Pages one time and install it on the hundreds of machines that are "in my control?"

There's no provision for site licenses and you're most definitely not allowed to implement any type of licensing restrictions/protection of your own as far as I know.

Apart from having to build two binaries and user confusion, I can't see any benefit to dropping direct sales and going exclusive with the App store. especially if a developer is currently paying less than 5% per sale for the credit card transaction and now has to end up paying Apple 30%

A lot of prices were also lowered when apps appeared on the store. Not sure if that's a permanent move or a sort of intro price. This worries me as well, I see a lot of devalued property out there.

How NOT to make a transition to the App store:

http://www.sophiestication.com/blog/coversutra-2-5/

Wow. Kick in the teeth for existing customers and for anybody that isn't on 10.6.

Didn't I read somewhere about someone running one of the purchased apps on an older OS release? Hopefully simply running in 10.5 or older 10.6 version isn't a way around the licensing/protection scheme.

I did read a mention somewhere a while back that someone had already broken the protection scheme though. Hope that's not true and it's at least as sophisticated as what I'm using now. By the very nature of having every app using the same scheme however, it's a much easier target for being eventually figured out.

I know you hate this idea from a developer perspective, but it's one reason I've held back from buying some software before. I personally use one Mac at a time, but sometimes it's a different Mac. Any time I travel, I do a sync process to dump files and some apps from my Mac Pro over to my MacBook. Software that locks to a specific machine irritates me greatly, and I'm not likely to just fork out enough money to buy two full licenses. If a software package offers a "Family" license for not much more, I go that route (as I have with iWork, iLife and OS X). Basically, I feel software should be licensed per user, not per system. It's very common for people to have multiple computers these days, and licensing needs to adapt to be customer friendly in these situations.

One piece of software that I finally got tired of transferring back and forth is a commercial IRC solution. It's coming to the App Store soon, and I'm going to buy it there, simply to avoid the hassle of license crap when I travel. Had the vendor chosen to remain off the App Store, I was going to switch programs.

As for the use in a non personal enviornment, it seems to be covered by this part of the EULA:

It doesn't seem to do that for me on my Mac. I've got all the updates applied for OSX 10.6 and iLife 09.

Does it appear in Purchases for you or is it somewhere else you see this?

This is how I sell my software. If one person owns multiple machines that only they themselves use, go ahead and install the same license on each of the machines. I don't think I'd consider tying a piece of software to a specific machine. Too restrictive and too much of a pain in the ass to administer. Plus I personally don't think it makes any sense - it's something I'm opposed to.




I also offer a family license pack which provides three unique licenses for three people in the same household. That covers the case of multiple people using the product on multiple machines at the same time.

It's possible that the increased exposure of the MAS wold offset any extra income from family licenses.

Personally, I think I'd like to support the MAS while still retailing a version outside the store. I'm customer oriented so I don't want to put anyone out, especially existing customers.

I also do volume sales for corporate and educational customers, either as individual licenses or group licenses. A great portion of my business this past year was in volume sales in fact. This is something developers need to be conscious of - I don't believe the MAS has any provisions for such installations/sales.

With the current software I sell it's unfortunate that I can't have it in the MAS, since it's a preference pane and not a stand-alone app.

I'd still like to see developers keep more than 70%, but again, this is something that can probably be offset by increased exposure and new buying habits. For some developers remarkably so.

They don't show up in Purchases, but if you see them in the store, they are marked as "Installed" instead of giving me a button to buy them. From what others have figured out, the App Store will scan already installed packages, and if the app and version match what is in the App Store, it will disable the buy button to avoid a potential double purchase. It won't allow a re download through the store, nor will it update the apps. So for me, it looks like iLife updates will continue to come from Software Update, and 3rd party apps that the App Store recognizes will still have to be updated via other means.

Odd. I can't find any of the iLife 09 apps on the store. The only iLife apps are the 2011 edition which just came out. I wonder if its a UK vs US difference for store contents.

If the bindle identifier string (typically "com.softwarecompany.appname") matches and the version number match, the app is listed as "installed." You have to trash the existing app, which may be a demo version, to be able to use the buy button in the store.

I really wish Apple had invested a little more time and effort into setting this up to allow migration from stand-alone app versions. I suppose however that that would also open up a desire to migrate back in the other direction which could cause some headaches.

I also wish there was more reporting available. As it stands, developers are losing a lot of what has previously made the self-distribution model so powerful from a market/marketing insight perspective. You'll never know who's buying your software for example.

Oh, oops. I'm getting years wrong. I have iWork 09, and iLife 11.

As for migrating from standalone to App Store, that would have been handy, but I don't see an easy way Apple could have done it. Proving to Apple I bought an app from eComStore or whatever to get mine flagged properly, instead of a pirated app would have been a nightmare.

ROFL!

My take on the OSX app store from a customer point of view is, as long as there is an alternative to buy and install apps then I don't see a problem. If it ended up like iOS, then I'd probably have to look at going over completely to Linux for my desktop.

Wow, that developer is kind of a moron:


Where do I start with this? Lets go piece by piece:

• First of all, she's surprised that she's received a 90% negative reaction to breaking a promise to her customers that she'd support them with free upgrades through version 3.0.
• She then asks "Would you all be happier if I simply set the version to 3.0 instead of 2.5?" Why would that make them happier? You'd still be forcing them into the App Store, and you still promised upgrades to 3.0 without having to pay again.
• She then says that 2.5 isn't much different from 2.0, which is going even further in the wrong direction if she wants to appease these people
• IMO, the worst thing you can do as a business is tell your customers "if you don't like it, go F-yourselves." I guess the customer isn't right here?

Sorry, this just cracked me up.

From what I've seen, the whole cadre of folks around this particular developer have always had some issues. There was a business relationship that ended between her and former partners at Tap Tap Tap (the same guy who runs the MacHeist stuff). That guy is a total douche but it seems that now applies to everyone previously involved with him. Damn.

My Apple ID since the mid-90s has been "wfaulk". Until today, when I was forced to update an email address and they decided to throw away my old username.

Fuck you, Apple.

Might Seahore suffice for "Photoshop Lite"?

Thanks. That's me and that's my problem....



The 3 of us (my small IT group) spent half an hour last week discussing this very issue. And the App Store in general. We don't see a way to make it work. So our approach will likely be "Ignore with Extreme Prejudice".

I have yet to find a simple and cheap piece of image editing software for the Mac that doesn't suck. And that includes Seashore. Of course, given the very limited amount of image editing I do, "cheap" pretty much means "free". If you're okay with Pixelmator's cost, how about Acorn?

Seashore/GIMP doesn't suck. At minimum, it makes for very happy customers who previously thought that they had to spend $200 to crop or resize a silly image. We have at least 5-6 customers who are amazed at the "free" Seashore.



It is all a sliding scale. I jokingly recommend "The GIMP! It is just as hard to use as Photoshop!!" Me? I get everything I need from Irfanview.

Jim

I am a big fan of paint.net, but that is a Windows program, not Mac. Ironically, it was Bitt who pointed me towards paint.net in the first place.

tanstaafl.

To crop or resize, I find Preview works well enough. I did end up grabbing Pixelmator, for the few times a year I need something above Preview. I may give Seahorse a look at a later time, thanks for the link.

I agree, I absolutely detest having to use gimp under mac os, it sucks big time. I don't have the same issues under windows or Linux (obiously), but there's something about running it under os x that just isn't right. (maybe gtk is just super nasty on that particular port)

I have to say that I pulled the trigger and bought pixelmator, I've been subconciously looking for some sort of image editing type program for a while and somehow pixelmator just didn't pop up on my radar.

I'm impressed too, really decent piece of software. A bargain at it's normal price and a complete steal at its current price.

Edit: I just realised why I detest gimp on mac so much. X11!

http://www.pixelmator.com/weblog/2011/01/25/pixelmator-grosses-1-million-on-the-mac-app-store/

$1,000,000 in 20 days.

Currently I'm seeing this for the top 10 grossing apps:

1. Aperture (Apple) - $80 - This has been really popular, as it's $120 less then the boxed store copy
2. iPhoto (Apple) - $15
3. Pages (Apple) - $20
4. Pixelmator - $30
5. Angry Birds - $5
6. iMovie (Apple) - $15
7. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - $50 - Sadly an Aspyr ripoff, this is $30 on Steam for Windows
8. Keynote (Apple) - $20
9. Numbers (Apple) - $20
10. Civilization IV - $30 - Another Aspyr game, and $20 on Steam for both Mac and Windows.

I ended up getting Aperture, at £49 it was too good to pass up. Especially since iPhoto 11 ate my library.

Had I not already got Apple Remote Desktop, I'd have definitely grabbed it at £45.

I also notice the IOS App Store commentards have made the move across as well.

I found Apple has this page explaining the differences between iPhoto and Aperture. Starting to debate if it's worth it for me to make the jump from iPhoto to Aperture now with the reduced price, and license to run it on all my machines.

What has stood out to you as the big difference?

I've already come up with a strategy to move my app (which is currently a pref pane and therefore ineligible) onto the App store. The writing was on the wall with the iOS app store, that despite Apple's heavy cut, it's just too good an opportunity to pass up, since for many people, it's the only way they'll be exposed to new software. For many developers it's a possibility to open up their market by an order of magnitude or more.

I'm excited. Scared, but excited.

I'll let everyone know once I'm ready to start paying you for positive comments and reviews.

For me really it's been the organisational stuff. That and it seems happy to work with my library stored on my ReadyNAS, something iPhoto really didn't seem to like to do. It also handles RAWs much better, when I started out with iPhoto it was all JPEGs off my little Ixus. As soon as I moved to my Nikon D80, it really started to bog it down.

The image manipulation stuff seems more in depth, but I've not had a proper chance to play with that yet.

Andy, re the iPhoto library stored on a NAS, I had trouble with mine too when the library was set to link photos to their original folders. After changing to the option of importing a copy rather than linking (tick a box in the advanced prefs somewhere), I have not had any more problems (touch wood!). This is with around 8000 jpeg photos. The downside is that it takes double the storage space unless you are happy to go along with iPhotos filing in 'rolls'. Me, I prefer to keep shots from different cameras in their own separate folders.

If you want to win an Apple Design Award then your app must be on the Mac App Store.

I've got no particular issue with this restriction. Its Apple's award and its their App Store so they can do what they like. I may feel different if I were a Mac developer though since some of the requirements for the Mac App Store are a bit draconian.

Last year Mac apps weren't eligible at all. So I suppose this is something.