passerinelabs

I actually really like the idea of sandboxing and entitlements for Mac apps. It's appropriate for like 90% of all the apps I run and I'll happily click through a scary warning for the things I don't think ought to run in a sandbox.

For some developers the MAS is a really nice alternative to direct distribution. You don't have to setup a merchant account and deal with all that. Your apps are automatically searchable (if not really discoverable). You have a built-in review/rating system to establish credibility pretty quickly (which absolutely impacts sales). It's not a horrible system, and again, Apple doesn't force you to use it... unless you want to use iCloud, but then again there's nothing stopping you from doing your own cloud sync solution as Omni has done.

How do you go from Apple not including a feature in the MAS (in this case, upgrade pricing) to "abusive relationship?" I and every other small Apple developer would really love some analytics capabilities in the app store, but we don't go around calling its absence "abusive" on Apple's part.

The MAS is just another sales channel and Apple doesn't force you to use it. It's not incumbent on them to add features just because some people want them.

Thanks for the feedback. I made the icon in Illustrator and then used photoshop to create the various icon sizes. Scaling down to the very small sizes (16x16, 32x32) didn't seem to produce great results. If the app ever turns a profit my first step will be to pay an actual graphics person to redo the logo and icons.

For OS X users, you can take a screenshot from the command line with /usr/sbin/screencapture, so putting together a little script to make a screenshot timelapse is pretty trivial. With that and ffmpeg you can replicate most of the functionality of my program in just a few lines of bash. :-)

Wow. Here's 25 more: http://pastebin.com/r2KVSmXp

I'm happy to hear any feedback: andrew at passerinelabs.com or @passerinelabs on Twitter.

Watching Notch's Ludum Dare videos inspired me to create my first OS X app store app. It takes screenshots at a configurable interval and than creates H.264 encoded video of the resultant timelapse.

Here it is: http://appstore.com/mac/ScreenshotTimelapse

Here are 25 promo codes if anyone wants to try it out: http://pastebin.com/K6Xx59jY