Thoughts on the Mac App Store

Here are some thoughts, in no particular order. I’ll be updating them throughout the day.

Initial Thoughts

  • Updating to 10.6.6 was crazy fast. Not surprising, since about all the update does is add the Mac App Store.
  • The Mac App Store looks a lot like its iTunes cousin. Layout is very similar to the iOS App Store on the desktop version of iTunes.
  • Holy cow, why so many gradients?
  • It is nice to have an app besides iTunes to use for editing my AppleID.
  • I wish that the iOS App Store would list purchases as neatly as the Mac App Store does.
  • Installing an App adds it to the Dock, and it gets a little iOS-like blue progress bar that fills up as its downloads.
  • Man, Twitter for Mac is terribly ugly. And can’t import account information from Tweetie. And it auto-updates, giving me a little seizure every 45 seconds or so as tweets scroll down.
  • The App Store knows I have iPhoto installed, but not Pages. My guess is that it can’t see Pages, since the iWork installer puts all three apps in folder, not just in /Applications.
  • Then again, the App Store couldn’t see I had Text Wrangler installed already. When I installed it from the App Store, it overwrote the copy I had already. Obviously, something is broken in the way the App Store and the /Applications folder talk to each other. I blame Finder. Update: BBEdit got back to me via Twitter with the reason why the App Store didn’t see Text Wrangler. Thanks guys!
  • Lots of reports of things not working for people on Twitter. The Store itself seems like its working fine for me at home. Weird.

Updated List: AM

Updated List: PM

The Second Mac

  • Once I logged into the Mac App Store on my MacBook Pro at work, my previous downloads (from my home iMac) showed up under the Purchases tab, but I kept getting an error until I logged out of the store and back in.
  • Apps downloaded that have been purchased from another machine are not automatically added to the Dock.
  • Preferences, game progress, etc. don’t get synced across Macs. That’s a shame — it would be great to have consistent data and settings.