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Posts tagged with "macappstore"

Weather HD by Vimov Victim of Name Squatting in Mac App Store

iOS and Mac development studio Vimov saw an unpleasant surprise yesterday in the Mac App Store: another developer, Presselite, is selling an application called “Weather HD” in the Mac App Store. The problem is, Weather HD is the popular application the Vimov guys released for the iPhone and iPad, featured multiple times by Apple in the App Store homepage and covered by all the major tech blogs.

The “Weather HD” that’s being sold in the Mac App Store is not affiliated with Vimov in any way – actually, Presselite “stole” the name from Vimov when registering the app’s name in iTunes Connect. This practice is known as name squatting. Read more

Mac App Store: 1 Million Apps Downloaded on Day One

This morning Apple announced that more than 1 million apps were downloaded from the Mac App Store on Day One. The Mac App Store was launched yesterday with around 1,000 apps available for OS X computers. According to Steve Jobs, “Developers have done a great job bringing apps to the store and users are loving how easy and fun the Mac App Store is”. The Mac App Store indeed offers an easy and fun purchase experience, although it’s pretty clear that some apps don’t exactly follow Apple’s own interface guidelines or aren’t exactly “best of the breed” of Mac software.

The Mac App Store undoubtedly changes the landscape of independent development for the Mac and software installation on OS X. One million downloads in 24 hours isn’t too bad, and we’ll see how these stats will pan out in the next weeks.

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Mac App Store Review: Contacts Cleaner

Developed by Spanning Sync and available in the Mac App Store at $4.99, Contacts Cleaner is a simple utility aimed at fixing the little problems that can slowly take over your state-of-the-art Address Book organization. I’m talking about unrecognized Unicode characters (because admit it, you tried to paste weird symbols next to your boss’ phone number), missing info and extra spaces between names that shouldn’t be there. Contacts Cleaner can fix these issues thanks to a minimal and simple interface that makes it easy to go through the most scary list of broken contacts. Read more

Mac App Store: Easy Installation of Apps On All Your Macs. Goodbye, DMG.

With the Mac App Store, as promised by Apple, you can buy apps once and install everywhere. As long as you make sure all the computers you’re willing to install apps on are your personal Macs (and you’re not trying to pirate apps that don’t come with proper receipt validation), you can purchase apps on your first Mac, and then pass them along to as many machines as you want. From a user perspective, this is just great – although it sort of kills the concept of “family licenses” we were used to in pre-App Store days. Read more

CoverSutra 2.5 Released, Exclusive to Mac App Store

A major new version of popular music controller CoverSutra by Sophiestication was released today, and it’s available exclusively on the Mac App Store at $4.99. For those who are not familiar with the app (which we last reviewed here in January 2009), CoverSutra is a desktop controller for music coming from iTunes. Unlike Ecoute, which is more like a lightweight music player, CoverSutra only display songs information by plugging directly into Apple’s software.

CoverSutra, however, doesn’t only come with a neat desktop widget that displays the artwork for the album that’s playing. Although that option got even bigger with the latest 2.5 update (it now supports artworks up to 256px on the desktop), what’s cool about the app is that you can assign keyboard shortcuts to almost any function supported by CoverSutra. You can choose to invoke a heads-up display window with music control through a hotkey, or assign multiple shortcuts to dozens of commands like volume up and down, next track, search and so forth. Search, for instance, happens in a popup coming down from CoverSutra’s menubar icon; you can search for any song, album or artist you want and navigate with the keyboard through the results to start playing.

The Mac App Store 2.5 also includes a new keyboard bezel display style, and an option to let the app automatically start and quit with iTunes. Now this is nice, as it’s an iTunes controller and it depends on it. CoverSutra 2.5 is available as Mac App Store-only here.

Mac App Store Now Open On The Web

Remember how Mac App Store links wouldn’t redirect to the web, instead opening the app? Now they do. It’s official folks: You can share links with your friends without having them worry about whether they have a Mac or a PC. Just in case the web preview annoys you by opening the actual app, you download the NoMoreiTunes Safari extension. On Google Chrome, just deny the pop-up message.

Mac App Store Impressions: Elegant, Some Apps Are Expensive, Others Suck

Today’s a pretty hectic day. Apple officially launched the Mac App Store as part of OS X 10.6.6 a few hours ago and mostly everyone in the Mac community is now playing around with the new Store, busy installing paid and free apps, trying to find what’s already good and what could have been done a lot better.

After a few purchases, free downloads and some minutes spent to get used to the new UI brought by the Mac App Store, we have some first impressions to share. Read more

Developer Heads Up: Don’t Forget About Receipt Validation In The Mac App Store→

Developer Heads Up: Don’t Forget About Receipt Validation In The Mac App Store

You can add receipt validation code to your application to prevent unauthorized copies of your application from running. Refer to the license agreement and the review guidelines for specific information about what your application may and may not do to implement copy protection.

Receipt validation requires an understanding of cryptography and a variety of secure coding techniques. It’s important that you employ a solution that is unique to your application.

You should perform receipt validation immediately after your application is launched, before displaying any user interface or spawning any child processes. Ideally, this check should happen in main, before NSApplicationMain is called. For additional security, you may repeat this check periodically while your application is running.

Otherwise, you could just download a paid application from the App Store, and freely distribute it to your friends. We want to make developers aware of the issue before you sell your app: Apple does not take care of this for you.

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Everything You Need To Know About The Mac App Store

You’ll find that the coolest thing about the Mac App Store is simply how easy it is to find great software. Upon updating to 10.6.6, a new Mac App Store icon is presented next to the Finder. We can’t promise you’ll like the icon if you were disappointed with iTunes 10, but I think you’ll definitely like what’s inside. This morning we’ve got a quick walkthrough so everyone can see what all the hype is about, and how great it is to have an App Store outside of iTunes.

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