Half Off for WWDC Week, Just in Time for Summer.
Today’s a pretty hectic day. Apple officially launched the Mac App Store as part of OS X 10.6.6 a few hours ago and mostly everyone in the Mac community is now playing around with the new Store, busy installing paid and free apps, trying to find what’s already good and what could have been done a lot better.
After a few purchases, free downloads and some minutes spent to get used to the new UI brought by the Mac App Store, we have some first impressions to share. Read more
A few minutes ago Apple released OS X 10.6.6 with access to the Mac App Store in Software Update. It is available now as a free 114 MB download for Snow Leopard users. As noted by Macworld, the Mac App Store already includes some apps from Apple such as the iLife ‘11 suite with standalone apps sold at $15 each. Sadly, there’s no iWork ‘11 in the Mac App Store – the iWork ‘09 apps are sold at $20 each.
Aperture and Apple Remote Desktop are also on sale in the Mac App Store, both available at $79.99.
Full changelog and first screenshots of the Mac App Store below.
Update: here are the direct links to the OS X 10.6.6. update.
Update #2: And here’s everything you need to know about the Mac App Store.
Coming to the Mac App Store this Thursday, Tembo is a new app from the guys behind popular OS X software like HoudahGeo and HoudahSpot that aims at providing a fast, fun and easy interface for Spotlight. Tembo will allow you to easily find music, mail messages, documents and bookmarks through a window that resembles the Spotlight UI you were used to on OS X Tiger.
Search results are grouped by categories, and you can enable, disable or reorder these categories in the app’s Preferences. A top bar for each category in the search results window will let you filter through these results already neatly organized in categories. It’s really powerful, but user-friendly at the same time. Tembo can list up to 2500 items in a single group, and can work as an extension to Mail and iChat to find messages and conversations, or Safari to search through bookmarks and history.
Tembo will be available on January 6 at $20 with a free trial available on the developers’ website.
Peter Vesterbacka, the “mighty eagle” at Rovio, thinks Apple is going to sit at the number one spot of mobile platforms for a long time. Angry Birds is, quite possibly, the most successful game that has ever landed in the App Store: more than 50 millions of copies sold, an equally popular iPad version that has been recently updated, a rumored sequel already in the works which will feature a “pig point of view”, Angry Birds cases at Apple Store. If that’s not enough, Rovio is launching its own pig-based mobile payment system.
Yes, true story. Read more
iTunes Connect went back online a few hours ago, and app updates started propagating again in iTunes. Together with the end of the “holiday shutdown” for iOS developers, Apple launched a new App Store section called “New Year, New You” to showcase apps “for health and wealth”.
The new section, though, isn’t limited at apps for fitness and health. Apple apparently has a broader view of new year’s resolutions, and decided to included productivity and entertainment apps in the list. For example, you can find apps such as OmniFocus and Things in there, Instapaper and Mortgage Pad, TED and Fitness for iPad. It’s a whole selection of great apps to start 2011 with a perfect app library on your iOS devices.
We think it’s a good idea. Check out the new section here.
In case you missed it, iTunes Connect is back online. The web interface that allows developers to submit apps, updates and price changes went down on December 23 for the so-called “holiday shutdown” which didn’t freeze the App Store charts as many believed, but still made it impossible for developers to submit apps and users to find updates in iTunes. iTunes Connect went back online a few hours ago, and app updates are now showing up in iTunes and propagating through the App Store. Read more
All those new iPhone and iPod touch users tracked by the official Facebook app? Yeah, the spike in traffic and new users isn’t limited just to the Facebook app. According to numbers reported by The Next Web and Business Insider, Rovio’s blockbuster iOS game Angry Birds and Tapulous’ Tap Tap Revenge 4 generated over 1 million downloads and twice the level of traffic of last year, respectively. Put simply: this year’s App Store and iOS growth showed its results on December 25th by bringing tons of new customers and downloads to apps that already managed to gain a prominent position in the Store. Or was it because of all those people that got an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad under their Christmas trees?
A little bit of both, in my opinion. Surely lots of people got an iDevice for Christmas and rushed to the App Store to buy apps; we shouldn’t ignore the fact, though, that several developers discounted their apps before the iTunes Connect shutdown (which ends tomorrow, by the way) forcing many users like me to save money for Christmas (or iTunes gift cards) and buy apps altogether right before the family dinner. Either way, those are impressive numbers. Read more
The highly anticipated new version of taptaptap’s Camera+ was released only two days ago, and while we’re still testing it in real-life situations before our huge review, we do think already it’s a great app update. In fact, Camera+ is one of our Top Camera Apps of 2010.
According to the numbers shared by taptaptap’s John Casasanta, Camera+ 2 has sold 500,000 copies so far. This made the app quickly climb the charts of the App Store, placing it at the #2 spot of overall Top Paid Apps right behind Angry Birds and above all the discounted EA games, which have taken over the iPhone and iPad App Store charts. Casasanta doesn’t know whether Camera+ will manage to get to #1 before the iTunes Connect shutdown (the App Store charts will be “frozen” from today until December 28th, and developers won’t be able to submit new apps, updates or price changes) or not, but releasing Camera+ this week was a clever marketing move nonetheless. They priced the app at $0.99 to celebrate the re-launch, put an additional effect pack in the app sold through in-app purchase and gained visibility thanks to all the blogs and Twitter users who mentioned Camera+ these 2 days. Thus, it got to #2 and it will likely stay there until next week. Very clever indeed.
Just as a reminder: the first version of Camera+ generated $250,000 in revenue in the first month of sales earlier this year. Well deserved.
Three days ago we covered the unofficial WikiLeaks app for iPhone and iPad, a $1.99 piece of software available in the App Store which let you access the latest diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks and check on the organization’s Twitter account. It was also nicely designed and sold as a universal app.
Developer Igor Barinov, though, wasn’t planning on taking all the money from the sales of the app. Instead, he decided to donate half of the proceeds to WikiLeaks, a move that likely pissed off Steve Jobs, or someone else at the App Store team. In fact, for some obscure reason or App Store guideline we’re no aware of, the app is gone. Killed. Kaput. There’s no WikiLeaks app in the App Store anymore. Without an explanation, the developer got an email from Apple about the changed state of his app, which was “removed from sale”.
I’m not sure this app violated any of Apple’s guidelines. It was a wrapper for a website (the CableGate documents) and a Twitter account – both of them publicly available on the internet. We all know there’s worse in the App Store, and – to tell the truth – this was also a good app. Assange and WikiLeaks are controversial and one may or may not agree with his efforts to “reveal the truth”, but there’s no reason to remove an unofficial app.
Unless, well, you’re Apple and you don’t care about your own Guidelines.
