Lately, updates to Apple’s official Mac software suites have tended to be first rumored by the strange source of pages for the idiot’s guides seeded on foreign Amazon dot whatever bookstore pages… and sure enough, that oh-so-reputable source is already touting iWork ’11 as coming out sometime in the near future.
But when exactly? Probably shot down the tube along with the splintered iLife ’11 apps when the Mac App Store launches, according to reports.
Speculation and squatting on app names has been a going on in the App Store for a while. It eventually became so problematic that Apple initiated some serious new guidelines aimed at cracking down on App Store squatters who were sitting atop popular app names without any app to show for it. That policy change seems to have worked in cutting down on name squatting in the iOS app store…. but if early indications are to be believed, it appears that Apple’s forthcoming Mac App Store might have an even bigger squatting problem on its hands, and that problem could keep some of the Mac’s best loved software frozen out of the Mac App Store indefinitely.
Last month, it was widely reported that Apple had reached yet another milestone with its App Store by chalking up it’s 300,000th app. The only problem with that number? It wasn’t true: while there were 300,000 apps in the App Store, a lot of those apps were inactive, meaning Apple hadn’t quite crossed the threshold for their milestone.
Still, time heals all, and now, Apple has actually racked up its 300,000th real app thanks to the average of 5,452 iPad apps and 12,218 iPhone apps uploaded each month.
The latest update to Snow Leopard — Mac OS X 10.6.5 — hasn’t even shot down the Software Update pipeline to users yet as a beefy download, but that’s not stopping Cupertino from seeding early builds of 10.6.6 to developers.
If you’re a Mac developer hoping to squeeze some more sales out of your software by bringing it to the Mac App Store, rev up your engines: Apple has notified developers that they are now accepting submissions.
Previously on Cult of Mac, I decried the growing alarmism of tech punditry regarding Apple’s as-yet-unreleased Mac App Store. GDGT’s Ryan Block citing something about the cloud or something, noted that his pet applications are probably not going to be hosted by the App Store, which therefore means that meaningful innovation in desktop software is impossible. I begged to differ.
But my greater scorn has been reserved for the subject of this post, the Gizmodo commentary “Big Brother Apple and the Death of the Program,” by Matt Buchanan. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s a doozy of tortuous logic, FUD, and faulty analysis well-worth your time. The following is my rebuttal to several of its most absurd assertions.
I’ve noticed an alarming trend over the five days since Steve Jobs introduced the Mac App Store at Wednesday’s Mac-focused media event. On all sides, the internet is being overrun by otherwise savvy tech pundits who have decided that Apple’s efforts to provide an easy-to-use, accessible, and intuitive marketplace for Mac software is irrelevant at best and, though you didn’t hear it from me, evil, too.
The most alarmist such pieces I have encountered thus far are Ryan Block’s “Will the Mac App Store have enough to sell?” from GDGT, and Matt Buchanan’s “Big Brother Apple and the Death of the Program.” The former, as you might imagine, argues that desktop software is dead, while the latter, predictably, foretells a grim future in which you won’t be able to read these words, and the keyboard I’m typing this post on write now will instead devote itself to composing Jobs-praising hymns.
I don’t often give myself over to Fisking, but I think it only makes sense to deconstruct these pieces by responding to specific arguments within. I am, necessarily, only excerpting from each piece, so I encourage you read them in their entirety — the full context is as ridiculous as the smaller slices. Up first, Ryan Block tells us why your notebook doesn’t have any software on it.
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.
With the launch of the Mac App Store set to occur in mere months and with Apple already encouraging developers to prepare to submit applications to Cupertino in November, it was only a matter of time before the App Store for Mac guidelines leaked out in full thanks to some anonymous NDA-breaking developer.
It’s a long list, which you can see in total after the jump, but there’s a few standout restrictions which are sure to raise some eyebrows. ReadWriteWeb has an excellent overview of the more notable ones. We’re particularly puzzled by Apple’s seeming aversion to RSS readers on the App Store, as well as their specific mention of a policy ban against all Russian Roulette simulators.
Though much of the buzz in the wake of today’s “Back to the Mac” event has been about the pair of sleek new MacBooks Air that Steve whipped out during one more thing (guilty as charged), the most revolutionary announcement was the Mac App Store. In one slide, Apple flipped the way people buy software for PCs on its head. Big ad budgets will soon be less important than a good relationship with Apple.
There’s a lot to debate about the Mac App Store (which we’ll do from now until a few years after its launch), but I want to touch on something no one is talking about yet: it makes Apple the greenest computer company on the planet.
