Apple's Mac App Store: Hands On

At the Back to The Mac event in October, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said that the company looked at the success of its wildly popular iPhone and iPad App Store, with over 7 billion apps downloaded, and wondered how it could transfer that success to the Mac desktop platform. The App Store "completely revolutionized how people get the apps. And why not the Mac, too?" asked Jobs.

At first, this sounded a bit like the tail wagging the dog, having the big powerful Mac emulate the smaller, less powerful devices. But there are clear advantages: The company wanted the desktop line to offer those platforms' easy finding, auto-installing, and auto-updating of software via a central App Store. To see whether the Mac App Store meets these goals, read on for a walk-through of the new store.

Installation
To get the App Store on your Mac, either simply run Software Update, and make sure you see the OS X 10.6.6 update listed and checked. After I did this and rebooted, the pinwheel spun on my MacBook for quite a while—longer than for the usual update. After a minute or so, the desktop launched, with a new icon for App Store added to the Dock.

Launching this brought up the store's main window, which also took a while to spin its progress indicator. Next, the center of the window said "Connecting to App Store." Then I got the message "Cannot Connect to App Store." Oh no. There's no "Retry" link, but there is a Reload Page menu choice, which had no effect. Luckily, a switch of Wi-Fi access point did the trick, so it was likely just a connection issue.

From the Store menu, I could choose either Sign in…, or Create Account. So apparently it's not automatically tied to the Apple account you use on the computer. But this is a good safeguard, lest anyone at the machine start purchasing expensive software willy-nilly.

Interface
Five buttons along the top of the window echo the iPhone, letting you switch among views for Featured, Top Charts, Categories, your Purchases, and Updates. The most prominent area of the default Featured mode is a rotating ad that takes up the top third of the window. Along the right side, a Quick Links panel, always present, lets you sign in, see your account info, redeem gift certificates, or get support.

Browser-like back and forward arrows let you navigate your store history, and a search bar at top right lets you find apps, and even suggests queries based on your initial typing. Below the featured ad is a section showing New and Noteworthy, below that What's Hot, and finally, Staff Favorites. The selection is impressive, especially if you compare it with Google's Chrome Web Store.

As in the iPhone app store, switching to Top Charts view lets you see sections for top Paid and Free apps, as well as top grossing. On this first day of business, the top app was, unsurprisingly, Angry Birds, while the top Free choices were Twitter, Solitaire, and Evernote. The Categories page offers a grid of 21 icons for topics from Business to Music to Utilities, each with three links to top apps in the category. The Mac app versions seem to cost more than their iPhone counterparts: for example Angry Birds is $4.99, compared with 99 cents on the iPhone. What's even more disheartening, I didn't see any apps that offered free trials, or "freemium" versions.

But the opposite holds true for traditional Mac apps, particularly those from Apple itself—it offers plenty of software bargains. The excellent photo editor, Aperture, goes down from $199 to $79, and you can buy components of the iLife '11 and iWork '09 suites for $14.99 and $19.99 apiece, respectively.

To view the Purchases page, you must sign in to your Apple account. After doing this, the page told me I hadn't purchased any apps. This brought up an issue that I'd wondered about when Jobs mentioned this at the Back to the Mac event: How does the App Store deal with apps you've installed by other means. For example, the iLife '11 apps are available through the store, and I already had them installed, so why didn't the Store know about them and offer updating? Clearly, you only get the advantages of the new App Store for apps you've installed through it, not all apps on the system. But there is one sign that the store is aware of installed apps: The price button next to Aperture said "INSTALLED" which happily prevents me from spending money on something I already own.

When you click into an app's own page, as on iOS, you see a description along with several screenshots, customer ratings and reviews. But unlike the version Jobs demoed at Back to the Mac, in the final version can't preview the working app from this page, nor can you try before buying. I wondered why Aperture could be downloaded as a free trial from the old software download page but not from the App Store. The thorough user review implementation at the bottom of the app page will help many potential app buyers, however. Users can not only rate the app, but the reviews as well. A nice graph of how many people rated at each level, a la TripAdvisor, further aids the decision process.