On MAS - the Mac App Store

The Mac App Store. Photo / Supplied

Apple launched the much anticipated Mac App Store with 1000+ apps today (Friday 7th January, NZ time). It's now open for business. The Mac App Store means you can find new apps, buy them using your iTunes account, and download and install them in a single step.

The Mac App Store is available for all Snow Leopard users via Software Update - the app is part of Mac OS X 10.6.6.

You can alternatively download the Mac OS X 10.6.6 Software Update.

(But note that the Mac OS X 10.6.6 Update is recommended by Apple for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard as it also includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. Information on the security content of the OS 10.6.6 update has also been posted.)

The Mac App Store appears after the update as a new application in the Dock. On boot, you'll notice the following features:

You can browse featured apps, top charts, and categories, or search for something specific much like in the iTunes Store. Likewise, you can read detailed app descriptions and user reviews, and flip through screen shots. Down the left side you can choose from top grossing and top free apps - and also note what other New Zealanders are grabbing. Users can browse new and noteworthy apps, find out what's hot, see staff favourites and search categories.

You purchase apps using your already-established iTunes account, or MAS will talk you through signing up.

Once done, apps install in one step and are quickly available from the Dock. In fact, the visually 'leap' off the MAS page and jump into the Dock - you can always choose to remove them (they'll be in your Applications' folder as well) by Control-clicking on the item in the Dock and choosing Options>Remove from Dock from the pop-out menu.

The apps already available are in the categories education, games, graphics and design, lifestyle, productivity, utilities and other categories.

Entirely new apps, as well as current Mac favourites, are available from third-party developers such as Autodesk, Ancestry.com and Boinx.

Cheap Apple apps

A surprise has been cheap single Apple Apps from the iLife suite, previously only available if you bought the whole bundle. iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand are all available individually in the Mac App Store for the bargain prices of NZD$18.99 inc GST, so if the reason you didn't upgrade to the latest iLife is because the only app you were interested in was iPhoto - well, it's now worth it.

Another bargain is that the Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps from Apple's iWork suite are also available individually - these productivity apps - broadly speaking, Apple-developed equivalents of Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint and Excel respectively - can now be bought for $24.99 each.

A genuine bargain is Aperture 3, Apple's powerful photo editing and management software. This is now available on MAS for NZD$104.99 - a lot less than the previous retail price.

Third party apps

Carl Bass, Autodesk's CEO, has brought the professional-grade paint and drawing app, Autodesk SketchBook Pro, to the Mac App Store on its first day of launch. SketchBook Pro is for artists and it's used to create everything from quick sketches to high-quality artwork right on their Macs.

Ancestry.com Family Tree Maker app is also on the Mac App Store, as is the Boinx animation, video production and photography software.

In use

The Mac App Store keeps track of all your purchased apps and notifies you when free updates are available.

The store automatically populates an icon in your Dock, just beside the Finder - you can move this if you choose to do so. App Store is actually an application which weighs in at 7.4MB. That means you'll also find it inside your Applications folder, just like any other App. Launch the store and you'll be presented with a remarkably iTunes-like user interface, complete with a series of highlighted Apps in different categories: top free, paid and grossing Apps are all listed. You have the usual Staff Favourites and so on.

You'll see that Apps you already have installed are noted as 'Installed', just like Apps on your iPad or iPhone.

Computerworld says MAS is super-fast and really easy to navigate. "The Mac App Store is going to generate huge wads of cash for everyone involved, Apple and its partners - but I do worry that app navigation and developer access to the Mac platform may suffer."

MacHeist members get Twitter secret features. Twitter for Mac, the application, has arrived specially for the MAS launch. Twitter has kept a promise made by MacHeist, offering exclusive access to secret Twitter features.

If you ever purchased the second nanoBundle from MacHeist you were promised a beta of Tweetie 2, but you never got it. MacHeist is offering purchasers exclusive access to beta, or features in progress for Twitter for Mac. If you are one of these watch your in-box for your exclusive secret key.

To learn more about the Mac App Store, visit this page.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com