Be Excellent To Each Other

it will be there tomorrow.. wondering what it will bring, only saw one screenshot again and again, allowing me to buy ilofe i work apps.. i have those already...
http://www.cultofmac.com/apples-mac-app ... ines/65022

I totally forgot about this, so I think that shows my expectations.
It depends what is available, but I don't use my Macs in the same way as my iPad or iPhone, so i'm not sure quite how useful this will be. You'll still be able to get applications the traditional way, the Mac App Store just seems to be a bit too restrictive at the moment.

I'm the other way; I think this is going to be pretty big.

I just don't see what i'm going to download and use, other than what I already have on the Mac. We'll see what is on the store though, i am prepared to be eating my words.

I think the frictionless purchasing and easy DRM (it's a lot like Steam) will enable a wave of micro-apps in the $5-10 range that we've never seen before, because they were never feasible before.

If they can sell me Photoshop & Illustrator for 59p I'll be impressed.

although we have seen quite a good range of paid mac shareware, let's see what effect that happens on that..

to celebrate, i just downloaded the old glider pro.. one of the first shareware games i had on my mac se/30

Glider pro? Sounds like a dildo and if that's what it looks like in the pictures you're going to need an awful lot of lube.

True. Widgets on acid essentially. But I don't use any widgets at all at the moment, hence my trepidation.
We shall see, as said, it all depends on the apps...

Well, I'm going to be writing daily roundups for TUAW for a week or so after launch, so stay tuned!

I hope you're right, because that sounds like Win! already. (Just as long as the micro-apps aren't just glorified Dashboard widgets, natch.)

It's certainly what we're seeing with games. Lots and lots of the little startups who have been cranking out $1-3 games for iOS are promising big support for the Mac App Store, both with ports and new content.

Will the same games that entertain when your out and about feel as good when you're at home with plenty of options, though?

It's a valid point, the smarter devs will presumably have thought this sort of thing through. Time will tell.

I think this will work out - provided the likes of Adobe get a bit real and start charging reasonable prices for the Tattyshop app* and stuff. I'd be spending it up like a loon, much like I do on every other fucking downloadable software store.

*I know you can get Photoshop Elements on the cheap, but barring myself, I don't know anyone who has bought it - most seem to prefer pirating the full fat version. But as Gaywood says, presumably using this model they could knock Elements down into the $5-10 range because it would cause less profit leakage from pirates. Maybe.

I dunno, I can see it working - the Mac crowd are always up for this sort of thing.

They make a fortune out of selling it full-price to non pirates though, so I don't know why they'd bother. PhotoShop is the epitome of 'pirated copy <> lost sale'.

Apple take a 30% cut on App Store sales. Do you honestly think Adobe (or Microsoft for that matter) are going to be OK with that?

How much do traditional resellers make?

*waves*

Hi chum!

I know actual professional graphic designers who have never paid for a copy of Photoshop. Ridiculous.

Didn't know that! But it's the old "sell it cheaply and sell lots of them" argument against what they're doing now. I know it's highly unlikely, but I was just sayin'.

This is true - but regardless, there are a lot of people who don't pay for Photoshop and surely Adobe would benefit by getting some cash from them.

More, I believe. But there are other considerations. For example, the distinctly frosty relationship between Adobe and Apple these days. Or the quite permissive DRM attached to the App Store - you can explicitly run apps you buy from it on all Macs authed against your iTunes account, which is far more lax than Adobe's per-machine licensing. Meanwhile, the benefits the App Store offers to devs - piggy backing on Apple's payment gateways, exposure, extra consumer trust, seamless patching - are almost meaningless to the biggest players in software who already have all that stuff. The most novel thing the iOS app store did was make micropayment apps feasible by reducing friction; but if your program costs £250 there's already an enormous amount of friction involved in making the buy decision.

I just don't see it making sense for these sort of guys.

I suppose Potatoshop was a bad example, but you get my drift. I think the store will work.

However, surely it'd only take one of Photoshop's many much cheaper alternatives to come up with a powerful, polished image editing suite for $10 - and as soon as that hits number one on the App Store charts, Adobe would have to jump in. Theoretical, but possible. I mean, the alternatives already exist, but the potential exposure on the App Store could seriously switch things around - in all kinds of markets. Word processing, image editing, video editing, etc.

That's a very good point.

*closes underpants flap*

I don't see $10, even with the exposure of the App Store, as a viable price point for something that can compete and keep up with any of Adobe's suite. Nor do I see Adobe willing to drop their premium price from just a little threat like that. Nor do I see Adobe dropping their prices on only one platform.

But who knows, maybe this App Store will shake things up a bit.

Well, I do see WTB's point. Consider Pixelmator, which is a pretty decent alternative to Elements or Paint Shop Pro on the Mac, and currently sells for about half the price of Elements. We can posit that if Pixelmator makes the shift to the Mac App Store, it becomes some amount more attractive to consumers - it competes more effectively with Elements. If that makes enough of a difference to worry Adobe, the logical methods to compete are lowering the price of Elements or putting it on the App Store. For political reasons, I think they'd favour the former approach though. P

Perhaps not at professional level, but will normal home users care if it can compete feature wise? The only reason home users pirate Photoshop at the moment is because they don't know of anything better. As long as teenage girls can remove spots from their Facebook photos and teenage boys can do stuff like this - which let's face it is what a lot of people pirate Photoshop for - light tinkering at home, someone is going to win big with a reasonably powerful, reasonably priced image editing suite thanks to exposure on the App Store. Likewise, as I say, for other areas of software.

I see both your points and have nothing to argue.

*Watches Internet break*

Definitely agree here, there's a big gap in the market. My money is on Pixelmator.

And that is exactly the piece of software I was thinking of, but I couldn't remember its name!

Is that the one with Keanu in?

point with photoshop it has become a verb, which even more interesting than brands become a noun (asperine), so people tend to look out for it..

on the other hand, think photoshop "elements", was positioned wrong anyway leading to the question "which elements", the elements i need? i'm not sure, let's pirate the whole version
(even if they use obly 5% of the features of elements)

come to think of it.. wouldn't in in-app purchase systerm work for these kind of apps.. base thing almost free, $3 for exporting to TIFF etc..,$2 for that funny filter, $7 for the magic wand?

You may have just invented Photoshop Satan Edition!

i am satan

anyway realmacsoftware thoughts
http://realmacsoftware.com/blog/more-th ... -app-store

It's up, BTW, as part of the 10.6.6 update.

Bloody reboot, messing up my uptime <grumble>

OT Have you had any of the "Service Battery" problem on your MBP? It hasn't effected the performance on mine but it looks like it's been an issue with a lot of Snow Leopard users.

Hopefully there's a software fix in this update.

Installed App Store, downloaded the Twitter client, was going to download Angry Birds for the third time, then thought "What the fuck am I doing" and shut it down

Loads of stuff on there already, but as expected, it's just the Apple iLife apps and ports of iOS stuff at the moment, nothing ground breaking.

Oh, and Aperture is up there for £45, which seems a bit of a bargain if you are into that kinda thing.

How's the Twitter client?

Exactly the same as Twitter for the iPad. Does the job.

I keep thinking this is a thread about mascarpone.

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/01/06/mac-app- ... n-day-one/
That was a lot of work!

is there any way to look at this without owning a mac?

Not meaningfully. Links to apps will show an info page in any browser, but you cant browse the store.

that's actually quite weird, would like to make an xbox like queu or something at work or with my iphone

Hmm, kind of half-considering Pages for £11.99, as I don't have MS Office, and could do with a non-flaky word processing app... Worth giving it a go?

And so it begins...