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.

Apple’s new iPhoto ’11 is here and it will continue to be the best part of my iLife. I’d like to think that many of you would agree with me. The new features that Apple announced on Wednesday are really awesome.

The new full-screen views, enhanced Facebook integration, and other new or improved features give me opportunities to be more creative. I’ll be able to share photos with family and friends in ways I wasn’t able to before and I cannot wait to get started.

A recent teardown of the new MacBook Air today revealed that the pretty little notebook is unsurprisingly laden with a bevy of proprietary engineering making it one of the most difficult notebooks on the market to repair. Highlights of the full break down can be read after the jump.

Steve Jobs is feeling pretty smug after yesterday’s unveiling of the new and svelter than ever MacBook Airs… so smug that he spent the hours after yesterday’s Back To Mac event openly ridiculing the morbidly obese laptops of the journalists present.

The exchange was reported by Forbes’ Brian Caulfield, who reported that after yesterday’s Back To Mac presentation, Steve Jobs loped up to him and pointed one trembling finger at the morbidly obese Dell M1210 Caulfield was writing a story upon and began to laugh at its fatness.

With about a third of iPad owners, the App Store is a rare destination. A survey released Thursday finds, among other information nuggets, that 32 percent of iPad owners have yet to download a single app – not even free ones. This could be disheartening to Apple and others, who see the iPad as an integral part in the Cupertino, Calif. company’s strategy of integration.

Another group, 63 percent of the participants in a Nielsen Co. survey, is the audience likely to adopt Apple’s new App Store Economy. These iPad owners purchase their games, read books, do finances – even plan their vacations on the iPad. With an App Store for music, video, books, the iPod, iPhone, iPad and now the Mac, these self-confessed early-adopters will accept Apple’s vision of the future.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs took the stage for the Back to Mac event and finally put the kibosh on the idea of touchscreen iMacs. He made some excellent points: namely, that multitouch really requires a horizontal configuration instead of a vertical one, making it only a really pleasant-to-use experience on a device like a tablet or smartphone.

Makes sense to us.If you’re just dying for the touchscreen iMac experience, though, why not transform your iPad into a semblance of one with the PadDock, which will turn your iPad into a tiny approximation of a 10-inch iPad. It contains built-in speakers, 360 degrees of rotation and the ability to charge and sync your iPad while it’s connected.

I mean, look: the PadDock is really just an iPad speaker dock with a novelty shape. That’s cool, but you may well not want to spend $100 on it, especially since the iPad in a vertical docking configuration is going to be subject to the same ergonomic difficulties Steve Jobs says is stopping Apple from bringing multitouch to the displays of their laptops and desktops. But take a good look anyway,because this is the closest to a touchscreen iMac you’re going to get this short of a really ingenious Hackintosh.

Steve Jobs has a penchant for ruthlessly killing off old technology. Throughout his career, Jobs has been celebrated for ditching dying technologies in favor of new: the command line (first Mac), the Floppy Disk (first iMac), SCSI drives, serial ports, dial-up modems, and FireWire on hard drives and iPods.

With Apple’s event yesterday Steve Jobs, went on a killing spree. Here’s eight technologies he gave the kiss of death to:

Sign seen in an electronics store in Surrey, Canada: Please Do Not Touch the iPod touch.  Straight from the “People Unclear on the Concept” Department.  Kafka would be proud.

Although one could argue that with Apple’s ongoing fetish for Shiny, Tiny objects, soon No One will be able to Touch the iPod Touch.

[via Ellen]

Yesterday we posted some first impressions of the Mac App Store by a list of some of the finest software developers around. Overnight we’ve had more responses from more superb developers, so here for your reading pleasure are their initial thoughts about the Store and what it means for their business.

Overall the mood is positive, but uncertain. There are still many questions to be answered. Almost all the devs we’ve spoken to are keen to get started, but not quite sure yet how they’re going to make it all come together.

(And to all the developers who took part, providing comment for this post and yesterday’s, Cult of Mac would like to say a big, big thank you. You people rock.)

This bit from yesterday’s event made me laugh out loud.

This was about 30 minutes in, and Randy Ubillos was showing us the new iMovie ’11 and its built-in trailers. Impressive movie soundtrack music blared out.

Randy turned to the crowd and said: “For the music, we went to London, to Abbey Road studios, and made original recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra.”

He dropped that in so casually, but just think about it for a moment.

For the sound effects used in one feature, in one application that lives inside a larger suite of media apps, Apple hired an orchestra, a conductor, a composer, Abbey Road studios, and all the paraphernalia that must have come with them. Caterers, hotels, management, hangers-on, producers, heaven knows who and what else.

That’s what you do when you have $50bn in the bank.