Discover and Track iPhone Apps with App Popular

As you can guess, I’m an heavy user of the AppStore: I love to discover new released apps, read the changelog of every app that gets an update, share apps with my friends. But, the AppStore is not perfect: many bloggers wrote about the problems the Store has but the biggest, in my opinion, lies in the core itself: discover new apps is difficult.

With more than 100.000 apps available and the new rules Apple rolled out last week, it’s become impossible to find fresh and interesting apps. Seems like only top grossing apps get to the front page.

Anyway, I think a solution to this has just been released. And it’s called App Popular.

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Favourite Tweets of the Week Nov 1-Nov 7, 2009

I usually tweet a lot of stuff: apps tutorials, news, videos, reviews, hacks and so much more. Everything that’s Apple-related and it’s interesting, it’s worth a tweet.

To keep up to date with all these links you can follow me on Twitter, but in case you missed here’s a small compilation of the best tweets of the past week.

You can find me on Twitter as @storiesofmac.

Enjoy!

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Apple Changes The Way It Handles AppStore Updates, Freaks Out Developers

Link

Previously when a developer updates an application, the updated app used to show up in the main category page in iTunes. This meant better visibility to the updated application which resulted in good spike in sales whenever an update is rolled out. These spikes in sales during the updates was the key motivation for developers to keep pushing out updates and to keep improving the apps.

With this new ‘upgrade’, newly updated applications don’t show up in iTunes category page. This means, when a developer updates an application, the update will be pushed directly to existing users and that’s pretty much it. There is no way for new users to know about those newly added features/improvements. Apple killed the key motivation for developers to improve apps, which I think is a BIG mistake.

Hey, Apple!

This.Is.A.Huge.Mistake.

Interview: James Hoover - Creator of Bean

Link

I’ve heard artists say that you can’t wait for the magic to happen, you have to sit at your desk in your office and make it happen. So I sat there looking at my clamshell iBook’s screen for about two weeks, trying to rid myself of the torpor. I was using Microsoft’s Office X at the time, which was very old school. At the bottom of your document window in Word you had this row of winkie blinkies with cryptic labels like REC, TRK, EXT, and OVR. I thought, “What are those things? Does anybody know?” People where complaining then about the endless rows of tiny icons you had to deal with in Word. Dozens and dozens of them. Back then, there was almost no other option for a Mac word processor. Microsoft had crushed all of its competition.

Interesting interview to the developer of Bean, a nice word processor for Mac OS X.

Mein Kampf Complete With Nazi Logo Approved

TechCrunch link

Ok Apple, this is embarassing. Let’s face it.

Now, I wonder how does Apple exactly “organize” the approval process. Is there a staff of drunk monkeys sitting in front of Powerbooks? Is it a team of - ehm - droids?

Or is it just a way to make people talk about the AppStore? I wonder how many people have bought that Mein Kampf thing today.

You’re smart Apple.

Dropzone: Your Dock Wants This.

I am a blogger, and my daily workflow often consists of repeating and boring tasks. That’s a given: I have to upload pictures, shorten URLs, send emails,install new apps. But if you’re not a blogger like me, it’s very likely that you repeat common tasks too.

Now, Mac OS is an excellent platform from this point of view: everything is simplified but yet powerful and thanks to some tecniques like Applescript or Smart Folders you can let the OS do stuff for you. But still, I missed an real application which would do tasks for me. By “real application” I mean an app that would sit in my Dock and not some scripts or complicated folder rules.

Here comes Dropzone.

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