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Mac App Store: Open for Business

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41–50 of 286 posts

Re: Mac App Store: Open for Business

#41
post #18

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.

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.

Re: Mac App Store: Open for Business

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why hasn't anyone else thought of this before!?! EDIT: Sarcasm.... ;)

Not sure if you're serious or not but apt-get has been part of Debian for ages and yum on Fedora. This is hardly a novel idea.

Re: Mac App Store: Open for Business

#43
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.

Re: Mac App Store: Open for Business

#44
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iTunes is by far the worst Apple product in terms of software engineering

Maybe. Never had any problems with it, be it Windows (long time ago) or Mac (since 2004).

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)

Re: Mac App Store: Open for Business

#45
post #27

Buy, download, and even redownload. its amazing how apple expected customers to pay for the same digital product over and over.

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.

Re: Mac App Store: Open for Business

#47
post #23

Distribute Mac apps on the Mac App Store $99/year Hm ..

Really that's a pittance. And it'll keep people from blatantly spamming the App reviewers with garbage.

I guess some would pay that much just for exposure on Mac App store, even if they had to host the app and process the payments themselves.

Re: Mac App Store: Open for Business

#48
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?

Re: Mac App Store: Open for Business

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why hasn't anyone else thought of this before!?! EDIT: Sarcasm.... ;)

Linux distros thought of it back in the mid-90s or so - 15 years or more.

Re: Mac App Store: Open for Business

#50
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.

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