Oh boy.

Some nice stuff - the new MacBook air machines. Not for me, but nice.

Software updates for iLife are a good thing for people who use those programs, I don't however. It's unfortunate to see a number of applications missing and it's super unfortunate not to see iTunes split into multiple applications yet.

The Mac OS App store. As a developer I feel this is horrible news. It's going to offer some additional form of promotion, however Apple is going to east 30% off the top and that's insanely higher than I'm paying right now. It's going to take away focus from developers' own sites, lower their direct sales, possibly limit or remove in-app automatic updates and compromise security on top of everything. The software protection used on iOS devices has been hacked and cracked to bits and I'm assuming the Mac OS variation Apple will use is gong to be the same or similar enough to get smashed wide open.

I currently have my own licensing system which works really well and which I'd like to use on future products. What a happens to an App if you want to sell it in the app store? Do you maintain two versions of it now? One for direct-sale and one for the App store?

With regards to the OS, I always take everything with a HUGE grain of salt. Any mention of "lots of features" or "more than 300 features" I usually translate down to "less than half a dozen new features you'll actually notice or care about."

It's been quite popular for Apple to announce features in the past and never deliver on those promises. They've done it with the past three major revisions to Mac OS. For Snow Leopard, does anyone remember OpenCL? Yeah, well it's not yet been deployed. QuickTime X? Loses most of the features of the old QuickTime. Resolution independence? Not yet being used... It goes on.

I think the news of the Mac OS app store is really bringing me down...

I think the Mac app store thing could be a good thing, as finding new apps on the Google is an exercise in slaying SEO dragons, and the various sites that try to catalog Mac apps range from worthless to disappointing.

It's not like the app store will prevent people from downloading and installing apps from other places (at least not yet -- If they ever did, or if they ever tried to do some daft "warning: this app isn't from the app store and might eat your children" thing, that's a different story.) But, assuming this is just another way to get apps, I don't have a problem with adding the app store to OS X.

I am curious -- they said they'll host free apps, too -- is there a fee for that, or do they take 30% of nothing?

I didn't even tough on the race to the bottom effect the App Store might have, like on iOS. I don't want to see Mac apps for 99 cents.

I know it's just another store front in which to sell your software and the Apple cut can be compared to selling through retail where the store (including the Apple store) will want at least a 30% markup. My biggest worries are about what I've already mentioned, the licensing and how you can have the same piece of software in and outside of the store. And wether or not Apple has any stipulations about that as well.

A consumer purchasing your app directly in the past or in the future, might later discover the App Store and wonder why they're not getting notified of updates via that interface when your app is clearly listed there. I'm also worried about the approval process of course and that it might just lead people to stop searching via other channels for apps.

I'm going to have to go pay Apple $100 to find out more information about it...

Back on to Leopard... I like the new OS-approved way to do full screen apps. Making use of that in a number of designs won't be difficult at all and can really enhance the experience.

Oh, I just keep thinking of things I don't like... Every app you buy on the App store is automatically licensed for every Mac you have. That's not how all software licenses in use today work - in fact very few. Even my current software, I have a special family bundle price for installing on up to 3 machines in your home. Even Apple has family packs for their software. This is also scary.

It's not really a lot better for other OSes.

FWIW, I tend to use IUseThis, which could really use a better tagging feature, and AlternativeTo.

VersionTracker has always been lousy, and now that it's just CNet, it's even lousier. MacUpdate is lousier than old VT, but better than new VT, which is to say, lousy.

If someone has another suggestion, I'd like to hear about it.

Also, there's already an app called Bodega that is an App Store for OSX. I imagine they're thrilled at this news.

Apple already has an apps site as well. They're super slow to make updates however which really pisses me off. They still list a version number for my app that's over a year old. I've updated the info twice, the last time last week with a new version number and details.

http://apple.com/downloads

It's now super difficult to find from the Apple web site though. I suspect they've been mostly ignoring this thing knowing that the App Store was on tap.

I like the indexing aspect and as mentioned, they already have that, but IMO, they should really level the playing field by making the re-selling optional. I suppose that taking visitors off to another site and payment gateway could be confusing for some people. Hopefully they allow prominent linking to the developer's own site and don't put any restrictions on self-sales of the same products.

30% is a good cut versus traditional brick-and-mortar distribution, but most indie devs self-sell online and let me tell you, my selling costs are no more than 5% which even includes web hosting. Plus I also sell hardware, how's the store going to deal with that? Especially if the hardware is complimentary to the software.

The other thing is that Apple's App Stores are consignment-based. Unlike a brick and mortar, they're not pre-purchasing any inventory in bulk or otherwise. Big retailers get great wholesale prices buy buying large quantities and promoting what they're selling. The manufacturer or distributor is generally already paid by the time the items sell off the shelves.

I'd be extremely surprised if Apple's credit card processing rate was even as high 2%. Where's the other 28% going? Minus hosting costs and some web development and maintenance costs, they'll be making a large chunk of cash. They claim they're not making very much on the iOS App Store, but unless they're putting the cash in a shredder and making confetti with it for office parties, they're full of shit. Oh my, how can PayPal survive on a measly 1.9-4%?

It's not really news that Apple's maximizing profits where they can, is it? Of course they'll make a lot. Probably less than 28%, though, when you factor in all those people they need to approve apps and make sure that they don't allow people to use the device in ways Apple doesn't approve of. But, I don't see this as problematic. Developers will decide whether it's worth it, some will go with the app store, others will try to get by without it.

Game companies have been doing the "make a version for Steam distribution" thing for a long time now. They bit the bullet, and they're generally glad they did...

I can see it generally killing off the ability for developers to sell anything which isn't explicitly Apple approved. This includes fast updates as they need to be vetted by Apple before being pushed to the app store. When I used to use my iPod touch more often, I saw lots of apps which had an update but the authors were waiting for Apple to approve them which sometimes took a very long time.

Considering the iOS approval guidelines are vague in places and the approval process itself is completely opaque apart from a yes/no answer at the end, I don't see it being a good thing that Apple will have this much control over computer apps.


The massive "feature" list is just the usual Apple hyperbole. There are always some decent features in there but as you stated, most of them are completely useless or so minor that you wouldn't have cared if it hadn't made the release.

The new air looks like a nice sub note it would have been nice if they put an ethernet jack on there though.

What do you mean by OpenCL isn't deployed yet? It's been in and supported since 10.6.0, and I've run the demo apps just fine on both my old NVidia 8800 GT and my newer ATI 4870. I don't know if any of my apps make much use of it yet, but like all new APIs, it's going to take time for people to figure out how to use them and best integrate them into their app. They also have to factor in backwards compatibility. With no OpenCL support in 10.5, most app makers weren't rushing to make 10.6 only apps right when Snow Leopard shipped.

QuickTime X did indeed drop a lot of features, but I've found I use it more then I did QuickTime 7 for tasks outside simple video watching. The built in upload to YouTube and quick trimming features, along with screen recording have come in very handy. I'm not going to specifically defend the dropping of other features, but it's not as bad as you make it out to sound, at least from my experience.

Resolution independence, not sure what the story is with that one on the desktop side, but it's tech that Apple has used on the iOS side with the iPhone. There would probably be a bigger push for it on the desktop side if monitors were going up in DPI drastically, but things seem to have stabilized for now.


30% of nothing is nothing (though to answer TonyC's question, you need to pay Apple $99 a year to be a registered developer, so there is a cost. That cost however is for an unlimited amount of apps on the store). But yet a free app still costs Apple money to approve, host, and otherwise support. From what I can find, about 31% of the apps in the store are free. The average selling price (factoring in $0.00 through the 7 $999 apps) is $2.61. I'd go further with the math to estimate how much Apple is pulling in with their 30% cut, but an accurate number isn't available due to not knowing how many apps are being sold/downloaded for free. Also, keep in mind the App Store revenue is lumped in with the general iTunes store and hosting costs, and that includes the much bigger file size movie rentals, podcasts, and other sources of content that all cut into any profit. For now, the iTunes store exists purely to sell hardware. With the potential for more expensive apps in the Mac App store, it is possible Apple may recognize more profit from it then their existing stores.

For me, I'm pretty excited about the store as a consumer. I know you mentioned the licensing as a concern, to me it's a huge benefit. Some developers like yourself offer "family packs" or whatever, but many don't. It will be much more tempting for me to buy an app knowing that I can use it on my home Mac Pro, my MacBook, or my Mac Mini. And the benefits of having one place to browse for a lot of apps will be nice. I do share the control concerns Trevor brought up though. Apple will really need to step up their turnaround time, and become more transparent on the whole process. If it becomes the only way to load apps, then I'll be really concerned, to the point of probably switching platforms.

Oh, as as far as the other announcements...

iLife enhancements, eh, but something I bought anyhow. I use iPhoto a lot, so it's worth staying up to date for me. I also get enough use out of iMovie to justify it.

OS X Lion, the full screen mode could be handy depending on how apps use it. Mission Control looks like a decent refinement and should clear up a bunch of my function keys if it works well. Launchpad is kinda weird to me since I use spotlight as an app launcher, but I see it being useful for others. At this point it seems like Lion may just turn out as another $29 upgrade unless they held back some other really big features from todays preview.

The new Air lineup looks really slick. Had I not gotten an iPad, I'd be really tempted by the new ones as I really liked my older Air. The resolution bump, the ability to go to 4GB of RAM, the better battery, and the extra USB port really addresses any concerns I had with the last model.

If they did, it wouldn't be so thin. Kinda weird to think that even USB may be getting too big as a port for how thin Apple really wants to make these devices. I will say the only time I used ethernet on my Air was at work when there wasn't a WiFi network for 3 months. Once they added that, I took the USB ethernet adaptor and threw it in a drawer. If I traveled to a place with only ethernet in the hotel room, the Airport Express came to solve that one.

I will say an innovative solution to the need for ethernet was done by the Voodoo PC folks. They built the equivalent of the Airport Express into the power adaptor for the computer. So if you did hit an ethernet only situation, all you had to do was use the same power adaptor that was likely to be on hand instead of needing a separate device.

At last.. an Apple netbook!
And since it doesn't include a free copy of WinXP, it is permitted to have a decent screen with decent resolution!

Now.. the only question for me, is can it boot/run Linux?
If so, I'll probably spring for one.

Cheers

Yep. Linux has run on the Mac for ages, ever since PowerPC support was added to the kernel. And if you have a really old pre PowerPC Mac, the Linux m68k project should cover your needs.

More relevant to the current situation, you can go two routes. You can boot the Mac into legacy mode (used by BootCamp to support Windows), and Linux will just use the traditional MBR boot loader and work as it does on any BIOS based machine. Or you can go the EFI boot route, and I'd recommend rEFIt as a good boot loader for letting you get into the EFI side of the machine if needed.

For specific hardware info, the Ubuntu Wiki is a good resource. The new Air is too new for their site, but hardware wise is very similar to the most recent Macbook (non pro) model. Info for it is here.

Specific to the Air for install, you will need a USB DVD drive, a properly set up USB thumb drive, or an SD card with the proper boot files for Linux.

And thankfully, since it's a real notebook, you get a proper Core 2 Duo CPU instead of an Atom netbook processor. Should keep those compile times down when doing heavy coding on the machine.

Umm, I've known the primary developer working on this at AMD since high school. It's not shipping yet. And NVIDIA's support isn't shipping yet either. I'm not sure what your demo apps do, but they're not using the vendor-developed OpenCL stuff. Probably just the CPU. Can't really get into any more detail in a public forum.

Here's something Apple might consider... Being able to adjust FONT SIZE system-wide. With higher resolution panels like that of the 17" MBP (1920 wide) a lot of text is just too small. Thankfully for my file manager I use Path Finder which is a lot more configurable than Finder (where you can only adjust filename font size).

Fixing some of the memory leaks and memory corruption in Safari would be nice too. Not to mention the bucket-load of bugs and poorly implemented features (address recognition) in Mail.

The quality of 10.6 in terms of stability has been much better on my Intel MBP than 10.5 ever was on my PowerBook, but generally speaking, I'm a little dismayed at the lack of attention to detail in many areas. I know, attention to detail is what Apple is known for. When compared with most any other company, they're head-and-shoulders above, but that's besides the point.

There are some bullet points about the Mac App Store approval process on TUAW.com right now. You're definitely not allowed to implement your own protection into your software. They do allow background tasks so long as you get the user's permission (this would have excluded a ton of software I've had in the planning stages otherwise).

Here are some points for rejection (from TUAW):



Here's good article from TUAW about two points, one expressly from the list and the other from the way the iOS store works. Demos/trials and upgrade pricing:
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/20/app-store-for-mac-highlights-two-major-app-store-flaws/

Yes, the numbers aren't available and I don't think that's simply because Apple forgot to share them. There have been 7 billion download though, that number they shared widely.

It may not even be very much money to them. A hundred million here and there tends to just slip under the rug sometimes. But it's profitable nonetheless and certainly not a loss-leader as they've implied numerous times.

I'd rather see them charge $200 or $300 a year to developers and only take a max of 10% revenue. They could easily make that work and it would be of huge benefit to the developers they're supposedly trying to help. While I like many Apple products, I've never been one to mix words about their goals. They're out to make products people like, but in doing so, making themselves as much money as possible.

Made me think of the slogan at the end of an old SNL skit. "Macintosh Jr., the power to crush the other kids."

http://videosift.com/video/MacIntosh-Jr-The-power-to-CRUSH-the-other-kids-SNL-skit

There was a "workaround" for those restrictions -- get one that came with a free copy of Win7 Pro, which came with a free WinXP boot disk and, ack-ptth, "downgrade rights". In that case the restrictions don't apply. But I think that getout clause itself had a time restriction which may have just expired. (I nipped in at the end and got a Toshiba Satellite Pro T110, 1366x768 screen, "Core 2 Solo" (Celeron) 1.3GHz.)


Apple hardware is better than Apple software. In fact, I'd go so far as to say they make the best Linux workstations available. (The bootcamp pseudo-BIOS thing tends to set its SATA up as legacy not AHCI, and needs to be quirked, but I'm guessing that what took me a day of hard googling would be second nature to the IDE guy.)

Peter

Mmm.. T110 is listed as discontinued. The "replacement" T110D is all AMD/ATI based, uses slower (but more) RAM, and is heavy.

Oh well. Maybe I'll just soldier on with the Dell X1 until somebody, someday, makes something as lightweight and good as this ancient tech still is.

Or settle for an 11" MacAir/Linux book. The non-replaceable batteries are a huge turn-off, though.

-ml

When I use a non-Apple laptop, I feel like I'm using a cheap soviet-era abacus made from recycle bread crumbs and metal shavings.

I have to wonder what is going on in the backend then. With 10.6.4 on my Mac Pro, I ran strings against the OpenGL driver for the 4870. It shows:

And I did verify that framework exists. If I run some OpenCL demo apps, like the ones here, I've set the ones that allow it to run only on the GPU, and I hear the fan spin up on the video card, more then I do when running games. Running Activity Monitor and checking open files shows the process has the OpenCL frameworks loaded, and a bit of CPU time but not much. If I set one to then run against the CPUs and GPU, I see an increase in CPU time spent.

AMD was late to get the support in, as initially this did only work on NVidia GPUs (10.6.0 and 10.6.1, possibly 10.6.2 timeframe).


I don't have XCode currently installed, but next time I do, I'll try and poke deeper.

I know the friend is currently still working on it, so I'm not sure what's in there. Possibly partial support, but it's not done yet.

Apple does offer a replacement battery service to cover the concern of a dead/weakening battery later in the systems life. If you want to go further and not rely directly on Apple, there are a number of places that sell laptop parts like iFixit. The new Air battery looks a little different, but should be replaceable yourself with just a few screws off the bottom panel. iFixit should have a complete teardown guide in a few days for the new units.

If your concern is more about in the field runtime, HyperMac sells external batteries and a charger cable for the MacBooks. However, they are currently in a lawsuit over this with Apple, and will be ceasing sale of the charger cables on November 2. They are in discussions with Apple to become a properly licensed vendor, and hopefully it works out. Apple has allowed similar battery extenders to be licensed for the iPhones, and even sells them in the Apple stores, so there is some precedent for this turning out well.

I must be out of the loop on this one. Someone elucidate.

Google "XP netbook restrictions"; for instance, here: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Microsoft-Netbooks-Storage,news-29101.html

Although Intel too put licensing restrictions on what laptops can be built with what processors.

Peter

Craziness.

Other developers' reactions to the Mac App Store:

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/21/developer-reactions-to-the-mac-app-store/#continued

Some of the same concerns I've already mentioned. There's no doubt the audience can be wider than any other single venue at the moment, but it's all the other bits that are still a huge cause for concern.

For those who are pressed for time, here's what basically every developer on that page is saying:

"This sucks and I hate it -- of course I'm going to use it!"

Microsoft should just stop selling XP if they are going to restrict what you can sell it with. If the "netbook" makers didn't have XP available they would just have to make more capable computers or sell them with a different OS. 1024 x 600 screen resolution is worthless you can't even surf the net with that. Aren't they coming with Windows 7 now anyway ?

They want to stop selling it. People don't want to run Vista or 7 on what is likely to be an underpowered computer. So they force the computers to be even more underpowered. Makes sense, right? (No.)

I certainly don't condone limiting netbook specs (I think its awful), but I disagree with some things:

1- While I wish I had a better screen resolution on my MSI Wind, I'm using it right now to browse the web and read my Google Reader items. If I ever feel like I need a little more screen, I can just hit F11 and it's perfectly fine.

2- Bitt, I think running 7 on these devices is a perception problem. Vista actually doesn't do well on netbooks, but Windows 7 is perfectly fine, and runs fantastically on my own netbook. The next round of products are a little more powerful than mine, too.