Jan 07 2011

Mac App Store Opens Today

The shiny, brand new Mac App store was officially ‘opened’ today.

The new App store does for Macintosh applications what the iTunes App Store does for iPhone and iPad apps. Well – that’s the hope.

For Mac users, it becomes much easier to find ‘niche’ applications, including games.

It gives developers the chance to have their applications displayed before a much wider audience – at the cost of 30% of revenue to Apple.

To access the Mac App store, you will need to upgrade your Mac operating system to 10.6.6.
This is a free upgrade to Snow Leopard users.
Open the ‘Software Update’ app, or select Apple Menu>Software Update.
After the upgrade, the App Store Icon will be on the left side of your Dock (next to Finder), as well as in the Apple Menu.

The first apps on offer were new versions of the Apple iWork suite – Pages, Keynote and Numbers.
These applications can replace Word, Powerpoint, and Excel respectively.
I have used them since the first iWork version and strongly recommend them all. For the first time, they are now available separately.

I’ve downloaded the free utility ‘Alfred’ which is a replacement for the venerable Quicksilver.
First testing suggests it is excellent. I’ll comment more in a subsequent post.

Have you downloaded anything from the new App Store?