Top stories

Apple Now Accepting iPad Apps, Planning “Grand Opening” of iPad App Store

Apple is now accepting iPad apps for a “grand opening” of the iPad App Store, according to an email just sent to registered developers.
“iPad will begin shipping soon and your opportunity to be part of the grand opening of the iPad App Store starts today,” the email says.
There’s no details about when the store’s grand [...]

Security Expert: “Mac OS X Is Safer, But Less Secure”

20100319-ipwned.jpg

Tech site H-Online has an interesting story today, quoting security expert Charlie Miller about his forthcoming talk at the CanSecWest conference next week.
He says OS X is full of security holes. There are lots more than in Windows, he claims.
And yet: OS X is a safer system to use. Why? Because, in the words [...]

Apple Devotes Entire Home Page To Jerome York Obituary

20100318-york.jpg

If ever you needed a sign that Apple was a different kind of technology company, this is it.
What other computer manufacturer would remove its top-selling, hype-inducing, industry-altering new product from the prime spot on its website home page, and replace it with an obituary to an investor?
This is one of those “Here’s to the [...]

Coming Soon: Steve Jobs, the Sitcom

Fake Steve creator Dan Lyons just signed a deal to bring Steve Jobs to another small screen near you.
The half-hour series called “iCon” is billed by the presser as “a savage satire centering on a fictional Silicon Valley CEO whose ego is a study in power and greed.”
Making sure the barbs prick will be the [...]

iTunes App Store pages get overhauled

Screen shot 2009-12-14 at 3.05.36 PM

The iTunes App Store saw a mass overhaul over the weekend in a move to more vibrantly showcase apps on their individual pages while simultaneously presenting more relevant information to potential buyers.

One big change in the new way that the App Store displays individual apps is in streamlining the description area. Seemingly in response to the less ethical developers who spammed that area with glossolalic spam keywords, the new description area requires pithier, more concise descriptions. After a couple of lines, the new system truncates the app description with a “Read more” link. Hopefully, the new system will make it easier for users to figure out just what an app’s main features are, but for now, that’ll have to wait until developers re-write their descriptions to take into account the new format.

Additionally, each app’s icon takes up much more real estate on the app page, making an attractive and professionally designed icon even more important in attracting customers. App screenshots are also more intuitively displayed: instead of showing only one screenshot at a time, with the existence of other screenshots conveyed by clickable gray bubbles, the new system shows all available screenshots in a scrollable frame.

The left column of each individual app’s page also now reveals a more organized view of the specifics of the app, including version, developer, and rating, as well as a quick and easy way to navigate to the most popular apps by the same developers. Each individual app page also features a row of other app recommendations based on your purchases at the bottom, cheerfully and colorfully arrayed by their app icon.

Overall, a nice update which should heighten the signal-to-noise ratio in the average App Page. Thumbs up, Apple.

If you enjoyed this article:
Subscribe via RSS or email, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter

About the author

John Brownlee

John Brownlee has written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Berlin with a charming girlfriend against whom he is currently enjoying a thirteen game cribbage winning streak, and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

Email the author | Read more posts by John Brownlee.

No comments yet.

Add your comment

Name(Required)

Mail (required, but not published)

Website

Comment

Buy Inside Steve's Brain Buy from Amazon.com Buy from Barnes & Noble