Apple is Now Accepting Mac App Store Submissions from Developers | Hacker News Reader

Apple is Now Accepting Mac App Store Submissions from Developers

maclife.com

29 pointsssclafani16 comments

though i'm both an iphone user and a mac user, i'm not happy to see the app store coming to osx. it's not because i don't think apple needs a better "package" manager for their OS, indeed they do. macports is great, but limited. though software installation isn't a major problem i feel needs fixing in osx, it's true there's no real "apt-get" for a mac.

i'm unhappy about the coming changes because i feel they signal apple's becoming more meddlesome in OSX which, aside from drivers and such, has remained remarkably open until this point. with the iphone i'm willing to give up some degree of freedom/control, as i'm rewarded by the appliance-like stability of the device even though so-called "iOS multitasking" is a nightmare and needs much work.

however i can't help but fear that in trying to monetize the mac in this way, that there are some dark clouds looming over the horizon. and maybe that's all it is ... fear. i hope my fears are not founded.

that said, i can't look at apple's showcase products (iphone, ipad) and somewhere in my mind not start making preparations to move back to ubuntu at the first sign of trouble.

There does need to be a good OSS equivalent of the mac's user interface to allow for people to jump ship. Not graphically styled the same, but the actual UX.

Everything out there is based on Windows' taskbar style of [window > application > menu], whereas mac is roughly [application > menu > window], and allows for applications to be running in the foreground with no open windows. If there was a nix window manager that operated like this, I'd be making preparations to jump ship now.

Unfortunately, everything seems to be taskbar-based with menus attached to each window. And the only attempt at improvement is that there's some pride in trying to cram more widgets on a taskbar.

Alt-tabbing is another area for improvement: on the mac command tab switches between applications, whereas on windows it switches between windows.

I know this is personal preference, but the Windows taskbar literally gives me a headache on a daily basis.

ubuntu is coming remarkably close these days, and i think 11 will be even better. it's just that it's not fully functional on newer macbook pros yet. not sure when support will get there for things like "automatic graphics switching" either. but when if/when it does, i'll probably jump ship.

i just get a warm feeling from using ubuntu. i've already got it loaded on my old white macbook and it works great.

I'm glad to see an app store coming to the Mac. I had an idea to build an app store for Mac and Windows as a startup a while ago, because I wanted to bring the convenience of Linux package managers like apt to Mac and Windows PCs and include commercial apps. I chose not to pursue that idea, because I predicted that something like this was already on Apple's roadmap and that they would beat me to it. It only made sense, since they already had most of the infrastructure in place with iTunes and the iPhone app store. I guess it turns out that it was a wise decision. (I feel like I should give Joel Spolsky credit for influencing my decision to not pursue that startup with his post on platform vendors: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/06/10c.html)

"I predicted that something like this was already on Apple's roadmap and that they would beat me to it."

Also, there's been an independent Mac app store for over a year:

http://appbodega.com/

Could still work on Windows (which is the bigger market anyway) whitelabel it and sell a version to Dell,Sony... you get instant traction and the vendors are happy (percentage of proceeds) but of course you have to sell it to Dell, HP, and Sony...

I had thought of that. As soon as the idea went from building an app store that I would use personally to one that would be Windows-only, I knew that I wouldn't be passionate enough about it to succeed.

I can't help but wonder how bad the initial round of "gold rush" type apps are going to be? If anyone had an iPhone when the app store first launched you'll remember all of the absolutely terrible apps that did well on the basis of being the only thing that existed.

I imagine that effect will be lessened, because people already have the option of buying/downloading apps for free on their computer. Sure, companies will hire contractors to pump out some crap, but I don't think people will feel as compelled to buy it.

there's also a very large body of high quality iOS apps, especially games, that could be ported with minimal effort

Not really. Most high quality apps are optimized for small touch screens, not 17" monitors with a mouse. And anyways, UIKit and AppKit aren't that similar, you'd end up rewriting almost everything.

Actually cocos2d-iphone, one of the THE premiere 2d game iOS toolkits added a Mac target a couple months back.

If you wrote your iOS game in that, you can pretty easily port it to the mac.

Looks like people are already squatting for app names too, which is lame. See: http://twitter.com/iTod/status/29635860674

What?! Names are unique?! That's LUDICROUS.

The assumption you're making here is that the person who's claimed 'Fluid' doesn't have a legitimate use for it

The funny bit is that it's easy to find that there are already two different Fluid apps for OS X today. The other one is a screensaver.

http://www.concepthouse.com/products/Fluid/

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