The forthcoming Mac App Store is pretty exciting news, but one thing I didn’t really get a good handle on during Steve Jobs’ keynote is if apps were distinct from programs in Apple’s mind. For me, an app is a smaller bit of less fully-functioned code, easily digested, while a program affords a much more substantial suite of functionality. Would the Mac App Store just be selling tinier programs, eschewing beefier applications like Photoshop or even Apple’s own iLife and iWork suite? I wasn’t quite sure.
It seems, though, that Apple answered my question during their own presentation. During Wednesday’s “Back to Mac” event, the keen-eyed fellows over at Electric Pig spotted iPhoto, GarageBand and iMovie as being apps on sale in the Mac App Store, each for a price of $14.99.
That’s interesting not only because it confirms to me that larger programs will indeed be sold through the Mac App Store, but that iLife ’11 will be divvied up into chunks when the Mac App Store is released in 90 days. That’ll be a real boon for consumers who only use one or two programs in the suite regularly: for example, I paid $50 for iLife ’11 essentially just for iPhoto, while I know that IMovie and GarageBand will essentially go unused on my hard drive. iWork will obviously go the same route. Great news.
