Posts tagged with "app store"

Apple Featuring “College Survival Guide” in App Store Homepage

Once again, Apple is featuring apps for college students in the iOS App Store homepage. The new section, called “College Survival Guide”, is available here and showcases more than 40 free and paid apps for iPhone and iPad.

Among the apps included in the guide, iBooks from Apple, iStudiez Pro, AP Stylebook, Momento and Instapaper. We’re not totally sure about Twitter and Facebook during classes but hey, at least they’re useful tools to stay in touch with friends. What about Netflix and Pandora Radio, though? I’m personally not sure about them either. Still, it’s good to see gems like Evernote and Put Things Off in the list.

Apple’s College Survival Guide can be accessed from the App Store’s homepage here.

VLC for iOS Pulled From The App Store, Now on Cydia

Just like we expected in October, VLC for iOS has been removed from the App Store. But this time, the removal of one of the most popular free apps for iPhone and iPad has nothing to do with Apple and the app review team’s rules. Instead, we have to thank developer Rémi Denis-Courmont, who since October has been busy trying to get the app out of the App Store because it violated VLC’s GNU public license. Rather than keep calm, carry on and let other developers (Applidium, the guys behind the VLC port to iOS) distribute VLC for iOS for free, he forced to get the app removed. Read more

How Apple Could Fix The Issue with “Installed” Mac App Store Apps→

How Apple Could Fix The “Installed” Mac App Store Issue

Since the Mac App Store launched yesterday, hundreds (if not thousands) of users noticed that apps previously installed on a Mac through a developer’s website show up as, well, “installed” on the Mac App Store. That may lead you to think the new Store can handle updates for apps purchased and downloaded out of it just fine, but it can’t. Either a bug or a “feature” in Apple’s system, those apps seems to be “installed” simply because the Mac App Store sees the bundle identifier of an app already present on your Mac’s hard drive. So say you have iPhoto, Pages, Panic’s Coda or Coversutra already installed on your Mac and you fire up the Mac App Store, those apps may be listed as “Installed”. But they won’t go through the handy automatic update process apps you really purchase in the Mac App Store have. It happened to me. And if you ask me, that’s bad user experience.

Daylen Yang has an interesting mockup on his personal blog of a simple feature that could fix this issue of apps showing up as “Installed”. Apple could simply offer a way to re-purchase applications found on your Mac although, yes, you’d have to pay again. But considering that several developers are moving to App Store-exclusive applications offering discounted prices now looking forward to future free version upgrades (example: you can buy Pixelmator again now at $29, but the future 2.0 version will be a free update), it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Or, Apple could evolve the concept seen in this mockup developing a way for the Mac App Store to recognize installed apps and provide more detailed information and options about what you can do.

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Weather HD by Vimov Victim of Name Squatting in Mac App Store

iOS and Mac development studio Vimov saw an unpleasant surprise yesterday in the Mac App Store: another developer, Presselite, is selling an application called “Weather HD” in the Mac App Store. The problem is, Weather HD is the popular application the Vimov guys released for the iPhone and iPad, featured multiple times by Apple in the App Store homepage and covered by all the major tech blogs.

The “Weather HD” that’s being sold in the Mac App Store is not affiliated with Vimov in any way – actually, Presselite “stole” the name from Vimov when registering the app’s name in iTunes Connect. This practice is known as name squatting. Read more

Mac App Store Impressions: Elegant, Some Apps Are Expensive, Others Suck

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

Apple Releases OS X 10.6.6 and Mac App Store

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.

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Mac App Store Preview: Tembo, A New Take On Spotlight

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.

Angry Birds Maker: “Apple Will Be Number One For A Long Time”

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

Apple Launches “New Year, New You” App Store Section

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.