Why are there back buttons ("like a browser") but you can't click hold to get the contextual drop down?
The navigation (Featured, Top Charts, etc) are so far away from the other controls (Back and Forward) its insanely awkward to use.
It feels kind of ... weird using an app store on my Mac. I guess because I'm fortunate in that I know where to look for Mac applications, I don't really have the burning need for a central place.
Do you use the Store and iDevice syncing parts of it at all? The Store always has me running around in circles unless I know exactly what I'm after and can search for it directly. The back button and breadcrumbs often behave contrary to expectation, and for some reason there only is a global search. The store also seems excruciatingly slow; I assume the servers are all located in North America and the content isn't optimised for transcontinental latencies.
iDevice syncing is full of unhandled corner cases which lead to crashes, inconsistent state, nonsense error messages, or lost data. It's also really easy to accidentally delete stuff off your device if you don't have the same data locally. I probably get the short end of the stick for being a developer: iTunes and XCode have a kind of love-hate relationship. That's far from the only source of problems though, I've seen all kinds of weirdness outside the context of iOS development.
Even outside of this, there are some embarrassing hiccups, e.g.:
- The UI becomes extremely unresponsive while importing media - it seems the import runs in the UI thread, or otherwise causes the UI thread to block.
- If you're editing metadata for a file while it's playing, there's a brief pause while saving.
There's no excuse for either of those, and seem the sort of thing a decent programmer with knowledge of the codebase could fix in a day or so. (I'm aware that ID3v2 is typically stored at the start of the file and requires the whole file to be rewritten; notifying the streaming playback thread of the byte offset shift and new file descriptor is however not rocket science)
Registered Apple developers only. Though there's at least one iOS bug that's getting close to being $99 worth of annoying to me (they broke an edge case of "sort album artist" behavior in cover flow a while back -- though I suspect it was on purpose, for efficiency reasons).
That has to be rare. For the brief period when I had an iPhone and was using it as my primary mp3 player, I had to use iTunes on Windows. This was from August to November of this year, and iTunes was almost completely unusable to play, manage, sync, or even view my music collection.
I use iTunes on Windows and Mac to manage a 300GB music collection. Never lost data, speed fine after first import and sync (to iPod an iPhone) works fine. I have auto sync off though, obviously.
Lack of support for third party codecs (FLAC specifically).
Lack of auto conversion support when transferring to devices.
"Genius" Playlists never work for anything obscure
Ping is terrible
Lack of tagging support (no autotag feature)
I use mediamonkey (i'm on PC), once you switch you can never go back. I can organize my collection exactly how I want it from in the software, i can browse my harddrives to preview music before I add to my library. It supports pretty much every codec under the sun AND will convert it to compatible versions for whatever device i'm syncing to.
There is also a plugin for discogs tagging support (one of the best online discographies in the world), a plug in for "autodj" (based off last.fm).
I realize that not everyone in the world is as anal about organizing music as I am, but for the job, itunes can't compete.
Big reverse opinion from me. I'm big into cataloging and organization of my files. iTunes rescued me from a complex nest of mp3 folders and got me into a unified metadata interface that allows me to slice and dice my collection anyway I choose.
For example, the following smart playlists:
- Top 100 highly rated songs that haven't been played in a month
- Five random Simpsons episodes (hooray bus entertainment)
- Unrated songs
- Highly rated songs from the 90s
- etc.
My wife and I use frontrow (just a skin over iTunes really) to manage our media library: dozens of movies, hundreds of tv shows, thousands and thousands of songs. Couldn't be happier with it.
Vigorously agree. I have no idea why I have such a hard time using iTunes, but I do consistently, even doing really simple and obvious things. It horrifies me.
To be fair, it's a pretty complex program that does very sophisticated things behind the scenes. I used to hate it, and I still mostly do. But I notice that the only people that really hate it are powerusers. There are hundreds of millions of people out there that find it delightful and enabling. It probably says something good about your UX if you're only bothering powerusers.
Powerusers don't want a UI. They think they want a scripting language. Most of them really want a butler, though.
Just make everything directories and let the power users do what they want. Just don't do that in the mainstream app. Keep stuff like that in the power user's special app.
I think there's a pretty compelling argument that iTunes has become a monolithic abomination trying to do a thousand things. Split it up into more programs that each do something simple and well.
I'm not sure splitting it up is the solution. But I 100% agree, it's become a bloated piece of crap. I've thought this for a long time now. Anyone have any alternatives, that aren't something like MythTV? I just want a lightweight multimedia app for my Mac (VLC doesn't have a great "library" feature, so that's a nogo for me... but something like VLC). VLC is my favorite app ever.
VLC doesn't have a great "library" feature, so that's a nogo for me
I really wish VLC had this kind of thing. I know there's an add-ons type architecture, but I've never seen anything for it to handle libraries, sadly. Does anyone know of anything like this, or anyone working on this? I'd be quite happy to donate funds to encourage its development.
As a side note, for folks looking for a lightweight Windows alternative, foobar2000 has been wonderful for me. Low memory usage, extremely customizable UI but sensible defaults, extensible, and automatically adds files with no hassle or slowdown.
I've been using Plex for Mac, and it's quite good. Not sure if it counts as 'lightweight', but it's fantastic. I load TV shows or movies into it (non-iTunes though).
I have it set up on my Mac Mini (connected via HDMI), and I can remote control it with the Apple Remote, but there's also an iPhone/iPad app that can both remote control (up, down, select, back), remote browse (tap on a movie or TV episode to watch it on the TV), and stream (tap on a movie to watch it on your iPhone/iPad).
It also has the nice feature of being able to automatically find any other Plex instances on the local network and automatically stream from them as if the media were local. That way, you can connect Plex to your media centre in the basement, but watch the data anywhere in the house (e.g. on a smaller TV in the bedroom or an iMac in the office).
It's really a great ecosystem, and if their partnership with LG[1] pans out, it might get that much better.
Not to mention that it is coded in Carbon which I'm sure doesn't help performance. If apple isn't working on a new version then they are very shortsighted.
> But I notice that the only people that really hate it are powerusers.
This is an excellent point. If I write network clients in elisp just for yuks, I'm probably not Apple's target user for iTunes. Emacs' UI has broken my brain (and hurt my fingers.)
I agree, and am hoping they will sooner, rather than later, rewrite it from scratch.
I did just move to an SSD over Christmas though, and must say it is significantly better now - especially noticeable is I no longer seem to be getting beach balls during iPhone syncing.
There's a lot of similarity between the latter two (rotated almost on a pivot). If Safari moved to the .app store variant, saving real estate in the top, I'd approve. Perhaps they're trying to phase in a new button layout?
Why does Apple now have three different window control
styles? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20635/Screenshots/r3da.png
Only three? That makes very consistent interface then.
Why are there back buttons ("like a browser") but you can't
right hand click to get the contextual drop down?
Back buttons are there, you know, to get back. Very common usage pattern. Contextual drop down? Not that common. Even Safari does not have it. Neither does Opera on OS X.
The navigation (Featured, Top Charts, etc) are so far away from the
other controls (Back and Forward) its insanely awkward to use.
Jus like on every web page? Does not cause much trouble though.
Only three? That makes very consistent interface then.
How is three good? Why are we applauding that, when, last week, Apple had two styles? I don't use Windows much but I'm pretty sure 99% of all the applications use the same window elements and style (this one: http://media.arstechnica.com/images/windows7/Peek%20-%20Befo...)
Back buttons are there, you know, to get back. Very common usage pattern.
Contextual drop down? Not that common. Even Safari does not have it. Neither does Opera on OS X.
It isn't right click, its click and hold. Same difference. Safari has it. App store doesn't.
Jus like on every web page? Does not cause much trouble though.
Aperture (and probably the other pro tools) has yet another style (greyscale), actually, but that only reinforces your point. The various different teams within Apple seem to be pushing their UIs in wildly different directions recently. iTunes was one of the first with weird UI (the back button in the iTMS is horribly broken); iPhoto '11 behaves quite differently to iPhoto '09, and unlike any Apple app before it. Now the App Store.
We're talking about Safari and iTunes--two of Apple's most frequently used apps. They might represent 1% of the app space, but they represent a large majority of the app usage space.
Lets compare Safari to App Store in terms of distance...
Not sure what are you comparing there. I was talking about navigation on the web page, which can be anywhere and its distance from browser's back and forward buttons. I wouldn't be surprised if iTunes store and now Mac App Store views are indeed rendered by WebKit.
I'd argue that it's in fact not common enough to warrant a physical button, since there are many apps, especially games, that don't have this specific notion of "back". In my opinion, it's probably more confusing to have a button that sometimes does one thing and other times something else or even nothing.
Back buttons are there, you know, to get back. Very common usage pattern. Contextual drop down? Not that common. Even Safari does not have it. Neither does Opera on OS X.
Yes, right click doesn't exist, but click and hold certainly does in Safari give you an context menu to go back one or more. The same does not exist for the app store.
That thing seems pretty beta, it even has a zoom button that does nothing. The translucent sidebar needs to be at least colorable (I'd opt for the standard grey though), I had a very dark background that made it hard to see where the window ended on the left. It's also a bit strange to grab and move since it lacks a top window border and any empty space up there to click on.
Just be thankful that they fixed app installation from "download .dmg, wait for it to check and mount, open it, open applications folder, drag app to applications folder, drag app from applications folder to dock, unmount .dmg, move .dmg to trash, open app, click through security warning" to "click buy, wait for download, open app".
If you try taking a screenshot of the AppStore (Cmd+shift+4+space bar), it doesn't include those window control styles. If Snow Leopard can't understand it, may be this is their new style for Lion?
It's not. The traditional method(s) will still work.
For me the main selling point of the centralized app store is that you get all updates in a single place instead of having each app spawn it's own update mechanism.
> It's not. The traditional method(s) will still work.
For now. I'm willing to bet any amount that in 5 years (most likely a lot sooner) this will be the only "legal" way to install software on your Mac (and you'll probably need to jailbreak your Mac to install apps through command line or something).
At which point every developer (except those working on platform-specific projects) would switch their work machine to Linux.
Phones and tablets went that way because they're new devices that weren't already entrenched in people's daily lives, and they're complementary to your primary machine. The fact that they're locked down is a dealbreaker for many, but it doesn't imply a wholesale ship-jumping like locking down a desktop would.
[Edited to clarify that I wasn't talking about the platform developers would target, but would themselves use].
I'm not sure they'll lose every developer to Linux. App Store will provide incredible exposure for their apps, which just may make it worth it for them.
Is adware prohibited from everything in the store? It seems like every windows application I download has some sort of toolbar bundled but maybe this isn't a problem on Mac.
You don't see a lot of that on the Mac, mostly because of the culture. A lot of the big players in the Mac development world have been developing software since the 90s or earlier, so have a tangible sense of quality about their work. Newer developers are usually attracted to developing Mac software for that reason, and they don't want to disrupt it.
It's becoming increasingly more popular for developers to release a free, ad-laden version in addition to the paid version though. NetNewsWire is one example and Kiwi is another.
Except that RAW processing and denoising in LightRoom 3 is so much better than in Aperture 3 for my Panasonic Lumix LX5 and Samsung GX-10. Do a cursory survey of the Aperture discussion boards, and you will see lots of people with RAW support that used to work fine, but broke after a Camera RAW update. Apple is also slow to add support for new cameras. Besides that, Aperture 3 is slow, even on recent machines with 4GB RAM.
I own both, and miss the "Places" and "Faces" features from Aperture in LightRoom. But given Aperture's deficiencies, I use LightRoom 95% of the time.
Is this like synaptic et al.? I mean, do you get updates automatically? That would be great! Also, a central packaging tool helps avoiding multiple installations of the same software, when dependencies can be tracked and resolved. If that is what this is: cool.
One of the sections says "Since developers are constantly improving their apps, the App Store for Mac keeps track of your apps and tells you when an update is available. Update one app at a time or all of them at once, and you’ll always have the latest version of every app you own."
APT/synaptic etc. don't 'auto-update' installed software. Some manual intervention is required. However it's possible to update all your software in one go, with one command. That's a great feature.
It doesn't automatically update apps, but it works like the iPhone App Store. There's a place in the app you can go to where you can see all apps that have updates available and then you can install all of them or selectively choose updates to install.
They don't do dependency tracking, but will notify you of updates. I don't think Mac developers believe in packaging libraries, since it requires the same version of the library for all programs. The preferred way to do things is statically compile all of your dependencies into your binary. This has the advantage that you can just drag your .app bundle around.
So what's the solution? In the absence of libraries that never break and are fully backwards-compatible with newer versions, we have to make some tradeoffs...
No. It is not. I'm really tired of this argument. It assumes other platforms are the same as Linux, and that's incorrect.
Here's why you're wrong:
Unlike Linux, Mac OS X ships with a standard, stable, and exceptionally complete set of libraries. Apple goes to great lengths to maintain binary and API compatibility, and this means a few things:
- Most applications will only require Apple-supplied libraries, as there's very little that isn't provided by the OS libraries.
- Apple keeps the OS libraries up-to-date.
This feature-complete ABI/API-stable environment is not free for Apple to provide -- it takes a lot of effort to provide a consistent API across libraries and maintain the API/ABI compatibility across releases, but the advantages are tremendous. Mac OS X has been able to skate by without package management for years because this approach allows for drag-install drag-uninstall application distribution.
UNIX derivatives, on the other hand, were faced with a lack of standardization of core application libraries, a huge number of incompatible libraries to fill in the gaps, and a software distribution model that involves splatting files all over the disk. The end result is that you need a packaging system to maintain security updates, manage all the files on disk, and upgrade the world in lockstep due to API/ABI compatibility issues across libraries shared by wildly disparate applications.
So -- tl;dr -- it's not a security 'nightmare' because the core libraries that everyone uses are already shared and updated by the OS vendor.
This is also what makes Mac OS X so much nicer to develop and distribute applications for as compared to platforms that require a centralized package manager authority to keep things sane.
I agree with you and I think all your points are valid but the GP specifically mentioned statically compiling dependencies, not using only what is already provided.
Something else that helps with Apple's way of doing things is their reasonably slow release cycle (when compared to most Linux distributions).
I don't know why someone downmodded you, but this is almost entirely correct in my Linux experience. Most of the major distros (Debian and Fedora is where most of my experience is) get so many things right it's amazing that it's all volunteers. Only when you start compiling random things from source, adding in non standard software, closed source binaries, etc, is when dependency hell can really start.
If you do it right, you don't really have problems with dependencies itself. Also look at other package managers like Portage (Gentoo).
The actual problem, from an app developer point of view is that you can't ensure that the lib behave exactly in the same way as on the developers system (and that may not just because of different versions but also because of different compiler settings etc). In many cases, the app developer also has some own patches inside some of the libraries to integrate them better into his application. It is often utopic to wait and hope to get those patches upstream.
Does anyone else feel that the word "app" is already branded to mean fast and cheap? Perhaps, it's just a perception that will diminish over time. I guess it sounds better than the "Mac Desktop Application Store".
at the risk of telling you what you already know...
programmes on the mac have the extension .app; it's roughly equivalent to .exe in Windows (except it's not a binary, more like a .jar). When the iPhone started, I guess 'App' was the natural name for them, and thus App Store came naturally as well.
Now it's come to the mac, it's makes even more sense, because it's back where it (Apps) started
Minor historical note: the .app extension for application bundles is a holdover from NeXTSTEP. I don't think that has anything to do with the usage of "app" on the iPhone, and I think the Mac App Store is branded that way for similarity with the iPhone store.
Macintosh programs have always been called "Applications", and "App" is a natural slang contraction of "Application". I'd say we're overthinking this, folks.
Good point. Although, if everyone moves to the Mac App Store, I wonder if you'll ever get to see the .app extension anymore. I'm assuming apps will all be maintained in a proprietary db.
The OP said "Let's say I wan't to host it myself". So his pricing is right.
And the new appstore doesn't stop anyone from hosting their OSS on github - even for Macs. The appstore is for the average user; github is for the better than average programmer.
Have the terms changed so radically from the mobile store? At least there licenses like the GPL are incompatible with the extra restrictions that Apple places on the software it distributes, causing software to be removed or refused.
It just means the garbage will be submitted by people with $100. There's plenty of junk on the iOS App Store which has the same developer license required.
If you're in any way serious about your Mac-based product, you'd probably want to be part of developer programme even if you don't care about the app store. (for testing with prerelease OS versions, etc.)
What are you talking about? I own several programs I bought before Mac App Store launched and store shows them as installed. I am pretty sure, that if you delete an app and then try to "buy" it again, you will get the same as in iOS App Store: a prompt that you already own this app and suggestion to redownload it.
I just deleted CoverSutra which I purchased this morning off the App Store and it went from "Installed" to "Reinstall" or "Not Installed" (I can't really remember which) and I was able to reinstall it with one click and it came flying back into my dock. Pretty darn easy if you ask me. However, I'm not sure if the purchases are stored locally in the app itself/cloud? Say, If I just got a brand new machine, would my app list be stored in the cloud and ready for my viewing if I logged in with my account in the App Store? I'm not quite sure about that part though.
The site suggests that you'd be covered: "You can install apps on every Mac you use and even download them again. This is especially convenient when you buy a new Mac and want to load it with apps you already own."
You did not get my point. Apple advertises redownload feature as it is something special while to normal logic the right to redownload has to be standard.
how is it wrong? apple advertises the fact that they will let buyers 'even redownload' for free the app a customers bought earlier. what is so great about it to advertise? is not that normal? I dont like the fact that apple makes a normal thing sound like a favor it is doing to its customers. which part is wrong in it?
I did say that, Pay attention to 'expectED', it is in past tense, what it means is apple used to expect people to pay for redownloads or not allow redownloads at all but now with introduction of this great new feature they are going to let you redownload or 'even redownload'. pay attention to how they said 'EVEN redownload', they are making an accent on the importance of this redownload thingy. i hope you got it now.
J3L2404 is not downvoting you — other people are, presumably because they do not think your conversation is adding to the discussion as a whole (or maybe they're just vindictive Apple fans). HN does not allow you to downvote responses to your own comments, so it couldn't be J3L2404.
Most people are not familiar with app stores, and barely more familiar with downloading software in general (rather than going to Best Buy to get a box or just having their son install it). It is not "normal" for them. Whether they'll lose the app if their computer crashes is a real question people have (and in fact some online stores do make it a real PITA to redownload). Apple is answering those people.
If you get an error 100 (http://yfrog.com/h4b9kkp) attempting to download any apps, clear /Library/Caches and ~/Library/Caches. Something to do with the Terms and Conditions acceptance not firing.
Clearing the cache directories was also not sufficient for me -- I had to clear the cache directories, then sign out from my Apple ID (within the app store) and back in.
I'm having an even harder problem - I have no ability to login using my current Apple ID (linking to a more detailed post I just made on tumblr, not trying to link whore).
I just had to remove the Apple cookies. This is done by Opening Safari -> Preferences -> Security -> Cookies. Search for apple. Select them all. Remove Selected.
There are a lot of apps that I'm surprised to not see in the store on launch day. Versions, Kaleidoscope, Skitch. I'd like to see a way for open source apps to show up here too, because I think managing my applications from the Mac App store will be nice.
Most of the apps I use are not there too, we'll have to wait a bit I guess.
What about Chrome and Firefox. are they forbidden and they didn't bother submitting ?
Anyone else feel like https://chrome.google.com/webstore makes this seem old-fashioned? Seriously who's going to be running software on their local machine a year from now (apart from hackers obviously).
There have been browser based remote desktop solutions for years now.
Microsoft Live Mesh and LogMeIn come to mind, but I'm sure there are others as well. They require some sort of plugin/Java/ActiveX/whatever, but hey so does video.
Only if the webstore weren't packed full of apps which are nothing but links to websites.
I run stuff offline pretty frequently. Online more frequently, but losing offline capabilities (especially in the face of links-as-apps) would be absolutely crippling for me.
Not that I doubt good WebStore apps will be capable of running completely offline. But that's certainly not the state of things right now, and the added programming complexity implies to me that it won't change very quickly.
I will say this: Apple is not afraid to leave old technology behind. While website XYZ aims to support multiple versions of every browser, including those released a decade ago (IE6), Apple won't even support Leopard with its new store, which was the version that came with the Mac I got just over a year ago.
If you look at the history of Apple this is something that they do often when they believe in something strongly. Removing the floppy drive, being one that I remember very strongly. I feel Leopard support would have been useful, however I'm sure they have a good reason for it. I actually welcome the App Store and I have some ideas for Mac-specific apps that would be very difficult to market for the money they would achieve and hopefully this will be a good route to market
It's also a subtle way to get the new age devs to forget about supporting two architectures. It's not so big of a deal with something that's entirely Cocoa, but this would cause a lot of problems with games and anything written with low-level, performance happy functions. I think.
By the very same logic Microsoft should push as strong as Apple because it makes even more business sense for them. They don't sell hardware. Their profit comes entirely in software. Do we see the same behavior? Hell no.
And risk alienating large businesses who want business critical legacy apps supported? I don't think so. It wouldn't make sense for Microsoft.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, because I don't have the figures to back this up, but I'd imagine most of Apple's revenue from Macs comes from the home, rather than a business environment. It's easier to convince a home user to upgrade to the latest and shiniest version than it is to convince a cautious and conservative IT department.
It's not brave, it just makes business sense and is a dick move. The OS you're running is just as good as the one you were running before. The applications you were running before are just as good as they are now.
Regarding OS X version: how do you go about upgrading OS X? I am a new Mac user.
I was given a free 2008 MacBook 13" in colledge. It came with Mac OS 10.5.2 installed, which couldn't run some new programs, so I did an update and it updated to 10.5.8 which solved all my problems so far. Are you supposed do buy an OS upgrade? Or buy a new Mac?
Wow, this is a major step towards creating an uniform marketplace for not just mobile and tablet but also traditional computers. It does seem like a natural next step, it should even have happened earlier, how come nobody thought of it until today?
Arrrg! No way of uninstalling apps in one central location. Why, Apple, why? There is this nice list of installed apps, why doesn’t it have an uninstall button? It doesn’t make any sense.
I guess you are expected to drag apps to the trash like before? That sucks.
You're right. But at the same time I wonder how many users understand the distinction. You can get 'rid' of a window by either hitting the red x (which I presume is the same as Ctrl-W), Alt-Clicking the dock icon (which I presume is the same as Ctrl-H) or going to Menu->Quit (Ctrl-Q).
It's easy to understand this, once you realize that window management is app-centric and is organized by Application rather than individual windows but that's a subtle distinction most normal users will not understand on their own.
To compound things, for some apps,closing the window will actually quit the app. And for some, closing the window leaves the app still running in the dock but clicking the dock icon doesn't bring up.
I know that an appeal to tradition isn't exactly the most persuasive of arguments, but the core Mac fanbase has been doing things this way for decades. I happen to like it a lot more.
Those few inconsistencies suck, though. Bad apps, what are you going to do? Well, you could reject them from a store...
But users can still see that an app is open because of its dock icon indicator, and also when they close the window, the application's menu is still visible in the menubar until they enter another app. So that helps.
Actually, that's a pretty clever optimization for caching, IMO. The user tends to leave apps in memory, leading to much snappier performance on machines with sufficient RAM.
EDIT: And if you're savvy, you can always manage memory manually and quit from the top menu or from the Dock.
If the OS is intelligent, the memory doesn't get overwritten until it is needed. Even if an app is completely closed and its process is killed, doesn't it's image still hang around in memory for the next time it is run?
The binary and libraries and accessed (and perhaps saved) files should still be in whatever buffers/cache the operating system maintains in the unused portion of RAM, but the state of the application is gone (unless the application saved its state and will restore it upon starting up again, of course).
What's especially bad is that the apps are installed as root and belong to root. This means that removing them causes a password prompt.
I wonder if the inexperienced user understands that for installing you need to provide the apple store password, but for uninstalling, you need to provide the admin password of your machine.
That depends. My mom and dad share the apple account (why buy all apps twice) but not their machines. I'm going to have a hard time explaining this to them.
I often wish Apple employed a few longtime linux users to point out certain glaring deficiencies (primarily in app/library management, and in how Spaces works).
Fair point, I suppose I just want a linux geek to look at the areas of OSX I consider to be deficient. I was thrilled when virtual desktops came to OSX as a core feature, but there are some bugs that seem like show stoppers that I'd think a *nix hacker would have run into. Similarly, it seems like 3rd party dev package management is always a chore... but on that front I'm probably just being anal.
Care to elaborate on the show stopping bugs of Spaces?
I use virtual desktops constantly in Linux, but have abandoned Spaces when on the Mac. I haven't really taken the time to distill what isn't 'right' about Spaces, so I'd be curious to hear what others think are the problems with it.
Sometimes a confirmation dialog will popup in a window, and I'm not sure about what conditions cause this, but it gets stuck "between" spaces so you will catch a glimpse of the dialog while switching spaces, but it vanishes once the desktop-changing animation finishes. This is often a blocking dialog, so the app becomes unusable (from memory it's happened with Safari and Dreamweaver). The solution is to stick the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, switch to the space the dialog should be on and click madly to make sure the dialog gains focus, then do the switch again but hit space or enter to take whatever the default option is in the dialog.
The second, less severe issue is that it will yank you between desktops 3 or 4 times for unclear reasons. It's sort of as if someone else is controlling the desktop switching and they just want to annoy the crap out of you.
FWIW, I used Desktop Linux/BSD for ~8 years before going to OSX, so maybe I have just been spoiled by a very old (eg, well debugged) virtual desktop implementation in X11.
I think the second issue mostly happens when things execute slowly (e.g. with a HDD bottleneck). So something takes focus, then something else completes and takes focus, etc. (I agree it’s terrible, just explaining what I think is happening!)
Not really a bug, but I mainly found it too slow. In linux you can just scroll over the desktop to switch. And I couldn't see how to drag windows across spaces for easy organization (without going the long way to show all spaces).
I'm with you for the most part on package management, but Spaces does some really crazy stuff. I'll be in one space, and suddenly get jerked into another. How can that ever be appropriate?
I realized something that I think is even bigger than uninstalling: There's no software trial mechanism in the App Store. That's always been the spirit of shareware (and a lot of hosted services, too). You install it, kick the tires, and then decide on purchasing before the trial is done. But here, even programs available for trial on the actual developer sites seem only to be available for instant purchase. (The equivalent to a trial period on the iphone I guess is the lite version of an app. I wonder if that will start to be the dominant approach for Mac software, too.)
I feel like developers will, an addition to building "Lite" versions, will start adding text to the production description that link users back to the website where they can download a full-featured trial version.
Apple has specifically mentioned that no trialware or Lite version of app is allowed on Mac App Store, and advise developer to host such version on their own. Good move by Apple.
It removes the unusable rubbish from the store.
The last thing Apple (or I as a customer) want is a vast quantity of demo or crippleware on my computer and cluttering up the store.
Demo and full version of the app could easily be combined into one entry and that would solve the clutter problem.
I don't know about you, but even 50€ is a lot of money for me, and I'd like to try the app first and buy it only if I find it useful. And I suspect that the average Joe will not know how to find the demo version on the internet.
I don't mean the crippleware. I was intrigued by an interesting-looking code editor, but I couldn't test to see if it would really work the way I thought it would, and it was too expensive to buy on a lark. Without sharp eyes, you may not see the developer's site link or know to check for a trial version.
That's odd - while browsing it just now I noticed Autodesk's Sketchbook has both "Pro" (paid-for) and "Express" (free) versions on there. Seems like they're not applying that rule consistently, if at all.
Whatever the comments on this, Apple is creating another new way/market for developers to make money and at the same for itself. Genius.
fyi, i do not develop apps for apple. i gave my mac to my brother about a year ago. i figured that i could do the same with my cheap acer without worrying about dropping or losing it.
App Store app is just a different interface to the itunes servers, you can try to copy links in App Store and you'll see the exact same kind of url as for tunes, movies, iOS apps, etc...
In fact I don't understand why they didn't integrate App Store in iTunes. Maybe they realized iTunes is crap, or they didn't want to change the icon once again.
Doesn't make me feel like they have long term strategies lately.. kind of the same with Facetime desktop not being in iChat.
I’m not sure those technical details matter at all.
If you ignore iTunes, Apple doesn’t do kitchen sink apps. Their apps might not have razor sharp focus (you can do a lot of different stuff with iPhoto) but in general they stick to one theme (but everything in iPhoto has something to do with photos). I’m a fan of the hypothesis that the only reason iTunes does so many different things is that it has to run on Windows. Apple might not want to ship a few different apps for Windows, they might want to keep it all together. Apple might already have split iTunes into a few different apps if they only had to run on the Mac.
The App Store doesn’t run on Windows, it doesn’t have the same problem so Apple just reverted to their default non-kitchen-sink approach.
In fact I don't understand why they didn't integrate App Store in iTunes.
The App Store installs itself as the second-highest icon on your Dock, just after the Finder. That's an amazingly prominent placement.
Remember that most people will be getting the Mac App Store unwittingly as part of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update. If they didn't have a separate Dock icon for it, those people would never find out it exists.
Call me old fashioned, but I fail to see how implementing a corporate middleman between developers and users can be a progress... OK, from a developer's stand point, this could be really beneficial (distribution, centralization etc), but as a user, it feels like seeing independent record stores about to be crushed by a shiny new Virgin Megastore.
I can't help to hope this will be an immense failure
Yes, you are probably right.
But then, it's just a feeling, and feelings can be pretty nonsensical sometimes. I've been an enthusiastic mac user for 20 years, now i'm surprised to realize I slowly grew to completely distrust and dislike apple's vision of what the computer ecosystem should be. File this under 'Snobbish rantings of a disappointed user' ;-)
distribution already exists! it's called the internet. fire up a website, have a downloadable app, and you're done. I don't understand why people keep saying the same for "app stores" like iphone and android, and now osx too. why can't I just search for an app on a search engine, goto that apps website, download it and run/install it? how does this system benefit me as a user at all?
It doesn't, because you're clever and knowledgable about computers. Unfortunately, not all users are like you. Tell an ordinary user to search for an app on a search engine ("what's that? oh, you mean google!"), goto that apps website, download it, and run/install it, and before you know it he'll have a dozen Bonzi Buddies stealing his credit card numbers.
Most users need a web browser (email, FB, gossip sites), maybe a word processor, and maybe an occasional game. They need something more like Chrome OS, not an app store. Sophisticated users (gamers, programmers, tinkerers) don't need an app store either.
You don't need it, but it makes things a hell of a lot more convenient. When I run Linux, I don't Google "linux media player", I just search the repository and install things much easier. If I googled "linux media player", I'd have to sort through various unrelated sites (reviews, howtos, spam/malware, old versions on different sites, forums, etc). When I search an app store/repository, I just get exactly what I want. It's less of a noticeable benefit if you know exactly what you want (because you can usually look for the app name and find their site), but it's helpful for searching for a category of apps. Additionally, it's nice to have a simpler update system. Updating apps on Windows is a mess, and I know I should really do more about it, because apps that don't include update functionality generally don't get updated.
you make a fair point, making the distribution easier is a nice feature. I still would have preferred a slightly more open approach however. How about defining an installer protocol? like install://url.to.my.servers/my.app.installer.json.or.whatever.format and then my browser could have the app installer for my OS registered on install:// urls. that way the installer format could be cross platform, and not controlled by any 1 company, but still be an easy point-and-click on a website without the hassle of running other things etc?
Then if you want the trust that the verification of apple gives you, you should make sure you only download software from apple.com, but the whole system is still more open and accessible by being online on websites rather than specific to a piece of software running on OSX.
I'm sure someone much smarter than me could draw many parallels, both good and bad, between malls and apps stores.
Personally, I say I hate malls myself, yet once in a while I get the urge to go and buy a few things I didn't know I needed. I find comfort in the consistency of the stores, that you can go to any mall and find roughly the same vendors. Once at the mall, my choices are narrowed down (which ties into the whole Paradox of Choice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...).
The app store significantly reduces the friction needed to discover and install apps. In the first 10 minutes of using it, I discovered 3 useful apps and installed them all without loading a disk image, installing it, dragging the mounted disk image to the trash, then deleting the disk image file.
Categories aren't working properly in the Turkish store. More often than not, I get the "One Moment Please..." message when I click on a category, and I have to go back and click on the category again.
Is anybody else experiencing the same thing on non-US stores?
285 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadWhy does Apple now have three different window control styles? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20635/Screenshots/r3da.png
Why are there back buttons ("like a browser") but you can't click hold to get the contextual drop down?
The navigation (Featured, Top Charts, etc) are so far away from the other controls (Back and Forward) its insanely awkward to use.
It feels kind of ... weird using an app store on my Mac. I guess because I'm fortunate in that I know where to look for Mac applications, I don't really have the burning need for a central place.
luckily it's only needed for music...
...oh wait
iDevice syncing is full of unhandled corner cases which lead to crashes, inconsistent state, nonsense error messages, or lost data. It's also really easy to accidentally delete stuff off your device if you don't have the same data locally. I probably get the short end of the stick for being a developer: iTunes and XCode have a kind of love-hate relationship. That's far from the only source of problems though, I've seen all kinds of weirdness outside the context of iOS development.
Even outside of this, there are some embarrassing hiccups, e.g.:
- The UI becomes extremely unresponsive while importing media - it seems the import runs in the UI thread, or otherwise causes the UI thread to block.
- If you're editing metadata for a file while it's playing, there's a brief pause while saving.
There's no excuse for either of those, and seem the sort of thing a decent programmer with knowledge of the codebase could fix in a day or so. (I'm aware that ID3v2 is typically stored at the start of the file and requires the whole file to be rewritten; notifying the streaming playback thread of the byte offset shift and new file descriptor is however not rocket science)
(Well, maybe the music store. But device management and syncing makes no sense.)
Lack of auto conversion support when transferring to devices.
"Genius" Playlists never work for anything obscure
Ping is terrible
Lack of tagging support (no autotag feature)
I use mediamonkey (i'm on PC), once you switch you can never go back. I can organize my collection exactly how I want it from in the software, i can browse my harddrives to preview music before I add to my library. It supports pretty much every codec under the sun AND will convert it to compatible versions for whatever device i'm syncing to.
There is also a plugin for discogs tagging support (one of the best online discographies in the world), a plug in for "autodj" (based off last.fm).
I realize that not everyone in the world is as anal about organizing music as I am, but for the job, itunes can't compete.
For example, the following smart playlists: - Top 100 highly rated songs that haven't been played in a month - Five random Simpsons episodes (hooray bus entertainment) - Unrated songs - Highly rated songs from the 90s - etc.
My wife and I use frontrow (just a skin over iTunes really) to manage our media library: dozens of movies, hundreds of tv shows, thousands and thousands of songs. Couldn't be happier with it.
Just make everything directories and let the power users do what they want. Just don't do that in the mainstream app. Keep stuff like that in the power user's special app.
I really wish VLC had this kind of thing. I know there's an add-ons type architecture, but I've never seen anything for it to handle libraries, sadly. Does anyone know of anything like this, or anyone working on this? I'd be quite happy to donate funds to encourage its development.
As a side note, for folks looking for a lightweight Windows alternative, foobar2000 has been wonderful for me. Low memory usage, extremely customizable UI but sensible defaults, extensible, and automatically adds files with no hassle or slowdown.
I have it set up on my Mac Mini (connected via HDMI), and I can remote control it with the Apple Remote, but there's also an iPhone/iPad app that can both remote control (up, down, select, back), remote browse (tap on a movie or TV episode to watch it on the TV), and stream (tap on a movie to watch it on your iPhone/iPad).
It also has the nice feature of being able to automatically find any other Plex instances on the local network and automatically stream from them as if the media were local. That way, you can connect Plex to your media centre in the basement, but watch the data anywhere in the house (e.g. on a smaller TV in the bedroom or an iMac in the office).
It's really a great ecosystem, and if their partnership with LG[1] pans out, it might get that much better.
1. http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/03/plex-announces-paternship...
This is an excellent point. If I write network clients in elisp just for yuks, I'm probably not Apple's target user for iTunes. Emacs' UI has broken my brain (and hurt my fingers.)
I did just move to an SSD over Christmas though, and must say it is significantly better now - especially noticeable is I no longer seem to be getting beach balls during iPhone syncing.
It does. Try it. Click and hold.
Apparently not common enough to warrant having a back button on the iPhone.
what do you mean by "alley or calico"? sorry, but google isn't helping me here...
For me the main selling point of the centralized app store is that you get all updates in a single place instead of having each app spawn it's own update mechanism.
EDIT: Sarcasm.... ;)
For now. I'm willing to bet any amount that in 5 years (most likely a lot sooner) this will be the only "legal" way to install software on your Mac (and you'll probably need to jailbreak your Mac to install apps through command line or something).
In another 5 years or so, Windows will follow.
Phones and tablets went that way because they're new devices that weren't already entrenched in people's daily lives, and they're complementary to your primary machine. The fact that they're locked down is a dealbreaker for many, but it doesn't imply a wholesale ship-jumping like locking down a desktop would.
[Edited to clarify that I wasn't talking about the platform developers would target, but would themselves use].
Yes, iPhones and such are locked down. That's the difference between iPhones and Macs.
While I certainly appreciate Apple, for coming out with a central place for installing applications, this is what I absolutely don't want.
Whereas on the iPhone the iAds and other ads are annoying, intrusive and flashy.
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
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●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
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●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------●
●------ http://goo.gl/l5v0b ------● ●---------------------------------------● Happy New Year◎,◎appy shopping ●------------------------------------●--
I own both, and miss the "Places" and "Faces" features from Aperture in LightRoom. But given Aperture's deficiencies, I use LightRoom 95% of the time.
Doesn't sound like auto-update though.
Here's why you're wrong:
Unlike Linux, Mac OS X ships with a standard, stable, and exceptionally complete set of libraries. Apple goes to great lengths to maintain binary and API compatibility, and this means a few things:
- Most applications will only require Apple-supplied libraries, as there's very little that isn't provided by the OS libraries.
- Apple keeps the OS libraries up-to-date.
This feature-complete ABI/API-stable environment is not free for Apple to provide -- it takes a lot of effort to provide a consistent API across libraries and maintain the API/ABI compatibility across releases, but the advantages are tremendous. Mac OS X has been able to skate by without package management for years because this approach allows for drag-install drag-uninstall application distribution.
UNIX derivatives, on the other hand, were faced with a lack of standardization of core application libraries, a huge number of incompatible libraries to fill in the gaps, and a software distribution model that involves splatting files all over the disk. The end result is that you need a packaging system to maintain security updates, manage all the files on disk, and upgrade the world in lockstep due to API/ABI compatibility issues across libraries shared by wildly disparate applications.
So -- tl;dr -- it's not a security 'nightmare' because the core libraries that everyone uses are already shared and updated by the OS vendor.
This is also what makes Mac OS X so much nicer to develop and distribute applications for as compared to platforms that require a centralized package manager authority to keep things sane.
Something else that helps with Apple's way of doing things is their reasonably slow release cycle (when compared to most Linux distributions).
The actual problem, from an app developer point of view is that you can't ensure that the lib behave exactly in the same way as on the developers system (and that may not just because of different versions but also because of different compiler settings etc). In many cases, the app developer also has some own patches inside some of the libraries to integrate them better into his application. It is often utopic to wait and hope to get those patches upstream.
programmes on the mac have the extension .app; it's roughly equivalent to .exe in Windows (except it's not a binary, more like a .jar). When the iPhone started, I guess 'App' was the natural name for them, and thus App Store came naturally as well.
Now it's come to the mac, it's makes even more sense, because it's back where it (Apps) started
Really? Why not? The iPhone is, after all, running a decedent of the NeXT codebase too.
$99/year
Hm ..
And the new appstore doesn't stop anyone from hosting their OSS on github - even for Macs. The appstore is for the average user; github is for the better than average programmer.
Also it helps pay for the reviewing of apps, although they still take a loss on running the appstore, last I heard.
No need to imagine: http://www.android.com/market/
>its amazing how apple expected customers to pay for the same digital product over and over.
Or are you trying to pretend you didn't say that?
Obviously false.
Although it is mildly amusing to watch your syntactical contortions, I'm out.
TL;DR: The world does not revolve around geeks.
http://dolinsky.tumblr.com/post/2623950787/sour-apple-app-st...
Nice little detail it knows whether you installed an application even if you didn't do it through the app store.
One interesting little thing though.
It seems like the different applications icons still need to catch up to the quality of the ios app icons.
Microsoft Live Mesh and LogMeIn come to mind, but I'm sure there are others as well. They require some sort of plugin/Java/ActiveX/whatever, but hey so does video.
I run stuff offline pretty frequently. Online more frequently, but losing offline capabilities (especially in the face of links-as-apps) would be absolutely crippling for me.
Not that I doubt good WebStore apps will be capable of running completely offline. But that's certainly not the state of things right now, and the added programming complexity implies to me that it won't change very quickly.
Supporting old OS by Apple: of course they want you to upgrade, to profit.
I would not say that's because Apple is brave, it makes business sense.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, because I don't have the figures to back this up, but I'd imagine most of Apple's revenue from Macs comes from the home, rather than a business environment. It's easier to convince a home user to upgrade to the latest and shiniest version than it is to convince a cautious and conservative IT department.
not necessarily. MSFT doesn't make PCs, unlike AAPL.
I was given a free 2008 MacBook 13" in colledge. It came with Mac OS 10.5.2 installed, which couldn't run some new programs, so I did an update and it updated to 10.5.8 which solved all my problems so far. Are you supposed do buy an OS upgrade? Or buy a new Mac?
Upgrades are easy and preserve all your stuff. No need to format or anything.
Of course you can buy a new Mac too.
Steam Store also opened it's doors in 2002: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)
I guess you are expected to drag apps to the trash like before? That sucks.
It's easy to understand this, once you realize that window management is app-centric and is organized by Application rather than individual windows but that's a subtle distinction most normal users will not understand on their own.
To compound things, for some apps,closing the window will actually quit the app. And for some, closing the window leaves the app still running in the dock but clicking the dock icon doesn't bring up.
Those few inconsistencies suck, though. Bad apps, what are you going to do? Well, you could reject them from a store...
If it wasn't for Windows confusing people by conflating windows with applications, I suspect most people's mothers wouldn't have a problem with it.
EDIT: And if you're savvy, you can always manage memory manually and quit from the top menu or from the Dock.
I wonder if the inexperienced user understands that for installing you need to provide the apple store password, but for uninstalling, you need to provide the admin password of your machine.
(And I say this as someone who likes Mac OS X almost entirely because of its Unix underpinnings)
I use virtual desktops constantly in Linux, but have abandoned Spaces when on the Mac. I haven't really taken the time to distill what isn't 'right' about Spaces, so I'd be curious to hear what others think are the problems with it.
The second, less severe issue is that it will yank you between desktops 3 or 4 times for unclear reasons. It's sort of as if someone else is controlling the desktop switching and they just want to annoy the crap out of you.
FWIW, I used Desktop Linux/BSD for ~8 years before going to OSX, so maybe I have just been spoiled by a very old (eg, well debugged) virtual desktop implementation in X11.
I get that he hates the desktop metaphor, but it still needs to be improved. Little things like the cube metaphor & wobbly windows go a long way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard
Longtime UNIX users are not Apple's primary customer base.
If your code isn't proprietary, you don't need that :D
I don't know about you, but even 50€ is a lot of money for me, and I'd like to try the app first and buy it only if I find it useful. And I suspect that the average Joe will not know how to find the demo version on the internet.
Probably because it's version 1.0
edit: never mind, it is showing up now.
fyi, i do not develop apps for apple. i gave my mac to my brother about a year ago. i figured that i could do the same with my cheap acer without worrying about dropping or losing it.
If you ignore iTunes, Apple doesn’t do kitchen sink apps. Their apps might not have razor sharp focus (you can do a lot of different stuff with iPhoto) but in general they stick to one theme (but everything in iPhoto has something to do with photos). I’m a fan of the hypothesis that the only reason iTunes does so many different things is that it has to run on Windows. Apple might not want to ship a few different apps for Windows, they might want to keep it all together. Apple might already have split iTunes into a few different apps if they only had to run on the Mac.
The App Store doesn’t run on Windows, it doesn’t have the same problem so Apple just reverted to their default non-kitchen-sink approach.
The App Store installs itself as the second-highest icon on your Dock, just after the Finder. That's an amazingly prominent placement.
Remember that most people will be getting the Mac App Store unwittingly as part of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update. If they didn't have a separate Dock icon for it, those people would never find out it exists.
Users don't want to search through multiple websites, use paypal and drag icons into the application folder.
You will be disappointed - users will love this.
Then if you want the trust that the verification of apple gives you, you should make sure you only download software from apple.com, but the whole system is still more open and accessible by being online on websites rather than specific to a piece of software running on OSX.
I don't trust you that your website isn't spam.
I don't trust you with my credit card number.
I don't trust you that your program is well made and follows conventions.
I don't trust you that you won't install a Trojan on my machine.
I don't trust you that you won't put Adware all over.
I don't trust you that your app is bug free and won't ruin the performance on my computer.
But if Apple accepts your app into the app store, I don't have to worry about these things.
Personally, I say I hate malls myself, yet once in a while I get the urge to go and buy a few things I didn't know I needed. I find comfort in the consistency of the stores, that you can go to any mall and find roughly the same vendors. Once at the mall, my choices are narrowed down (which ties into the whole Paradox of Choice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...).
I don't think that's an accurate comparison because:
1. the Virgin Megastore doesn't get 30% of the revenue from the independents.
2. the Virgin Megastore doesn't get copies of the customer lists and sales records of the independents.
3. the Virgin Megastore can't slap their logo on everything in the independents' stores.
4. the Virgin Megastore cannot easily create their own competing versions of the independents merchandise.
This morning's productivity is probably blown...
Is anybody else experiencing the same thing on non-US stores?