Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Mac App Store is Now Live
So, yay, the Mac App Store is now live. I’ve only been playing with it for a little while, but a couple of things jumped out.
First, why is it a separate application and not part of iTunes? My first thought was to prevent Windows users from trying to buy applications from the Mac App Store and then complaining when it won’t run on their OS. But that seems like a simple thing to check from within iTunes or omit from the Windows version. Of course, I’m still confused about why iTunes doesn’t interface with iPhoto and automatically offload photos from my iPhone, so this is simply yet another mystery.
Second, there’s no wish list functionality. In iTunes, you can add items to your wish list, and I use this a lot to remember things that I want to snag. I’ve already stumbled across several applications that I might want to purchase, but since there’s no wish list functionality, I have to keep them listed in a separate text document. Which is stupid. I’m sure this feature will be introduced at a later date, but it’s absence is making me stabby.
Third, as detailed by Panic (Inc.), unless you purchase the application from the store, you won’t get upgrades through the app store application. The Mac App Store will show that you have the application installed, but you won’t receive updates through the Mac App Store unless you repurchase the program through the Mac App Store.
The Mac App Store may show software bought from us previously as “Installed”, even though they’re two different licenses. You will not get Mac App Store auto-updates unless you purchase from the Mac App Store. To re-enable the “Purchase” button in the Mac App Store, just drag the app to the trash. Your preferences/sites will not be affected.
As Gruber notes:
If the Mac App Store “sees” the existing app, why not assume it’ll provide updates for it, too?
It’s a logical assumption on the user’s part and this going to cause a lot of unnecessary confusion. It either needs to only mark items purchased through the store as “Installed” or allow the updates.
And then there’s the as-yet unresolved The product distribution file could not verified error that several seem to be experiencing.
These few bumps aside (and I’m sure there are more issues than these), the rollout seems to be pretty smooth.
P.S. OMG I MADE A TIMELY POST.
Hargrove’s App picks for 2010
Here is the Angry Birds interview we discussed during the show. And here are my picks for 2010.
iPad
Game
Pinball HD – I don’t play many games on the iPad but when I do, this is it. It’s fast and furious fun, although The Deep is the only table that really impresses me. The other two tables are fairly dull, but The Deep is fun enough to make up for it.
General
Reeder – Like Dave, this is an app I use a lot and I love it. It makes reading my news feeds easy and fun.
Pad Folio – I don’t really have a need for a portfolio, but I enjoy keeping some of my best work together in one place. This portfolio app is perfect for that and has more features than I’ll probably ever use. It’s easy to use and my pictures look great.
Honorable mention: Netflix – Streaming movies to your iPad is one of the things the iPad was made for. Netflix did it right. This is an impressive app.
iPhone
Game
Angry Birds – This game will suck you in like no other. I don’t even like playing games on the iPhone but I play the hell out of this one.
Fruit Ninja – And I probably play this one more than Angry Birds. It’s fast and addictive.
General
Instagram – I’ve bought more camera apps than any sane person should, but this is the app that made it click for me. It’s fun to use and makes sharing super easy. It’s the app that finally made it click for me. I’m finally using my phone to take pictures.
RTM – Requires Pro membership on RememberTheMilk.com. I use this probably more than any other app, just as I use RememberTheMilk more than any other website.
Macintosh
FastScripts – I’ve owned this for probably three years now and only started using it this year. It makes executing any script as simple as hitting a keyboard shortcut. If you find yourself doing repetitive tasks and have a bit of scripting knowledge, this is your answer.
RipIt – I’ve yet to find a DVD that RipIt can’t handle. It’s easy to use and has never failed for me.
Honorable mention: Handbrake – This program is perfect for getting your movies into a different format. It’s great for converting a DVD for iPhone or iPad. The interface can be a little daunting at first, but I’ve found that 99% of the default values are just fine.
Dave’s App picks for 2010
iPad
Game
Angry Birds [$4.99] – pretty much a given. This game has been in the top 5 for nearly a year!
Lego Harry Potter – Years 1-4 [$4.99] – This is a personal pick. For a $5 App Store game, this game has a ton of content that is unique to the iPad. The Console version of Lego Harry Potter has completely different game content. The developers did reuse cut-scene content from the console version. However, the actual game content is unique to a touch interface and is quite clever.
General
FlipBoard [FREE] – There was a lot of amazing applications created this last year for the iPad. Many are must haves, however, FlipBoard was an big ticket news item when it came out. A huge controversy over how it used RSS feeds to pull content and reformat to make the article look like a virtual magazine. However, FlipBoard seems to have pulled out of that news firestorm just fine and seems to be getting the backing of many websites.
Since its initial release, there have been a few updates, the recent of which have made FlipBoard quite an impressive news/magazine application.
Reeder [$4.99] – My personal pick for 2010. Reeder has been a solid Google Reader front-end and has rarely failed me. I use Reeder exclusively to keep up with my news feeds. Recently, its been seen so much as the standard for news readers, that another developer took it upon themselves to copy the UI elements of Reeder nearly exactly. So much so that a big uproar over the issue has spawned. The offending developer has since stated that they are in the process of changing the UI so as to not look and work so much like Reeder.
iPhone/iPad touch
Game
Angry Birds [$0.99] / Cut The Rope [$0.99] – It is pretty undeniable that gaming has swept the iDevices pretty strongly. There are lots of reports that iOS gaming is giving Nintendo and Sony a strong run for their money. It’s not fair to compare the number of gaming titles in the App Store with those of the GameBoy & PSP. There are a lot of crappy game apps in the App Store. However, there is a pretty strong percentage of quality titles, and those titles are growing very quickly.
Angry Birds and Cut The Rope are two very strong examples of very popular casual games that are not only on iOS, but Android and probably very soon on Windows Phone 7.
We Bowl [FREE] – My personal pick, We Bowl isn’t an outstanding title. I don’t actually do that much gaming on my iPhone. I tend to use my iPad for gaming since it’s easier to see the screen. However, I find myself in We Bowl quite a bit. It’s an interesting take on multiplayer gaming and bowling. Instead of waiting for your opponent to play each frame, you bowl multiple frames each turn, then wait for your opponent to take their turn. You bowl 3 frames the first round, 3 frames the second, then the final 4.
Throwing the ball is more like Skee-Ball than most other bowling games and there are “power-ups” that you can pickup to make scoring either easier or harder depending on how lucky you are when picking up a power-up.
We Bowl is quite fun and best of all, it’s Free. Like pretty much all ngmoco’s titles these days.
General
Camera+ [$0.99] – Camera+ has returned to the App Store and is as popular as ever. Their decision to attempt to sneak a feature that was against Apple’s rules, using the volume buttons as a shutter, didn’t seem to backfire. In fact, it’s hard to blame TapTapTap for trying since Apple themselves changed the way a hardware switch works on the iPad.
Camera app replacements are quite popular for developers to write these days. There are quite a few and each one offers some pretty interesting ideas for picture taking. A recent addition is MagicShutter that allows you to take photos that look like you kept a camera’s shutter open for a very long time giving you the ability to takes some pretty amazing pictures and double exposures.
AppShopper [FREE] – My personal pick allows you to use, in my opinion, the best App Store monitor website on the WWW, AppShopper to keep track of what apps you have purchased, and let you know what new apps are coming out as well as letting you know when apps go on sale.
You can mark app as “want” and the AppShopper app will notify you when the app has been updated as well as when it goes on sale.
Macintosh
Transmit [$34] – Neither of my Mac picks are new for the year, but they have both have been updated for the year. Transmit has had one of the most dramatic changes of the year. Cleaner UI, higher speed throughput.
I use Transmit every week to upload the podcast to the website. Transmit is the only FTP client I use, even though I have a few installed including CyberDuck.
Parallels [$79.99] – I have been using Parallels for years. It was the first virtualization application I purchased and is the only paid virtualization application I keep up-to-date. For a couple of years, I was jumping between Parallels and VMWare Fusion because they were leapfrogging each other on the performance. However, Parallels seems to have taken the advantage and keeping that advantage. (This is, of course, my opinion.)
Tons of new Mac news
Apple announced a bunch of new stuff for the Macintosh. I must say it’s about time.
Apple has spent a large amount of time on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad these last 3+ years, they have devoted a very large amount of their programming resources on iOS, and in all fairness, they needed to do so. Apple has grown like crazy over these last 3+ years. Their stock is hovering around $300 a share which is astounding. If only I had purchased Apple stock back when it was in the teens… :sigh:
Apple today decided it was time to return to the Mac in their “Back to the Mac” press conference. Steve Jobs announced with the help of quite a few of Apple’s VP’s, a new iLife, FaceTime for the Mac, OS X Lion, and a couple of new MacBook Air’s.
Announced today was:
- iLife 11 – Available now for $49
- FaceTime for Mac – Available now in Beta
- Mac OS X Lion – Available Summer of 2011
- Two MacBook Air’s; 13.3″ and 11.6″ screen sizes – Both available now
The thing I am most pleased to see is FaceTime for Mac. It works great and allows you to call any iPhone/iPod touch using their email address/phone number.
You can rotate the image on the Mac just like if you were using an iPhone with a button on the FaceTime window, or if the person on the other end using an iPhone/iPod touch rotates their device, the FaceTime window will rotate as well.
Video quality is pretty good, not great, but when your talking video being sent over WiFi at 30fps, it’s going to be a little blotchy. Still, it’s way better than VGA quality video that I have seen from other webcam’s.
I’m a bit concerned about Mac OS X Lion. They are introducing the Mac App Store in 90 days that will run on both Snow Leopard and Lion when it comes out next year. It will work just like the App Store for iOS. Developers will get a 70/30 cut of sales, free apps can be featured in the store as well. That all sounds great, but will Apple be reviewing the applications like they do with the iOS App Store?
Of course, you can still sell your software yourself outside Apple’s new Mac App Store, but it will be harder without Apple’s incredible marketing resources helping.
There are many other changes to Mac OS X Lion which we will be talking about fully on the podcast. You can check out the new info at Apple’s website.
iPhone/iPod touch/iPad app: Fractile
Fractile is an amazing piece of software for the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad that draws the Mandelbrot set in all it’s glory. Benoît Mandelbrot first discovered the set back in 1979 and later published a book; The Fractal Geometry of Nature in 1982.
Mr. Mandelbrot recently passed away which may have been the reason that this particular app was written. Probably not, but it’s nice to think so.
The app starts with a presentation of the Mandelbrot set that we all have become familiar with:
Simply tapping on the screen starts the zooming in process. Tap on a location on the set, and the program will zoom into that location. You can pretty much continuously tap and the zoom will continue very smoothly with a pretty high degree of resolution.
There is a settings icon on the screen so that you can change the degree of resolution so that once you find that “perfect” spot, you can render it as high a resolution as possible from within the app, take a screen shot and use it as a wallpaper or just a great picture.
Tapping with two fingers allows you to zoom back out and tap-holding will restore the zoom back to where it started.
Here is a sample image I pulled from my iPhone after just a few seconds of zooming into the set:
The best part of all, this app is Universal and Free!
Absolutely the best Fractal application I have yet to find for any of the iDevices!
Universal App: Life Web Browser
I came across this bowser in a review from an iPhone/iPad website today and liked what I saw. Life Web Browser. I have actually seen it before and it’s premiss was interesting then. However, they have since I last saw it as a Universal app and added some really nice new features.
The feature that caught my eye this time was being able to queue loading tapped links on a page. As you find links you want to look at, simply tap them with Queueing turned on and they will be queued up as sort of tabs on just that browser tab. Sounds confusing, but its a real treat.
I use AppShopper.com all the time and look at the top 200 apps pretty much every day to see if there is anything new that is really popular. Normally, I’m opening up links to those apps in a new tab. Now, I can turn queueing on and load them in the queue for later.
The browser also has normal tabs that you can go to by swiping the screen left or right. It also displays the tabs in a slide up pane similar to the task switching feature in iOS 4.x.
Bookmarks are visual showing a thumbnail of the page with the name of the page in the bookmarks screen. Refreshing a page is a simple matter of pulling the page down like most Twitter iPhone/iPad clients do these days.
The address bar doubles as a Google search field with Google suggestions built-in.
I have only scratched the surface using the browser, but I’ve placed it next to Mobile Safari on my iPhone and iPad.
I’ll write up a better review when I have spent some serious time with it.
Windows Phone 7 looks pretty good
The new Windows Phone 7 phones look pretty darn good and the price is very competitive at the $199 price point.
Tested.com has a good set of articles on the new devices and their features.
The interesting thing with Windows Phone 7 is that there are going to be many manufacturers as well as a couple of carriers. Pretty similar to Android phones.
They have the right idea with their new OS. Keep it centered around the user of the phone. Collect all their social network connections when they first setup the phone and gather info from those sources. I really like the idea and I really dig the Metro look and feel. I like the way the background graphic scrolls along with the UI elements to give the user a feel of moving across a larger interface.
From what I understand, the Windows Phone 7 OS is about as configurable as iOS is. Meaning that you can change a few aspects of the UI, but not much more than basic colors and background graphics. This is actually a good thing for users that are not geeks. It’s kind of a departure for Microsoft. Although, I can’t say for sure since I haven’t really looked at Windows Vista and Windows 7.
So there are now 4 pretty strong contenders in the mobile smart phone market. RIM, Microsoft, Apple and Google/Android. This is really a good thing for the consumer, since it will mean better and better smart phone OS’s over time and price wars.
