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Jason Feb 5, 2013 11:59 AM

Divergence and convergence, Innovation, Social impact, Strategic thinking, Technology

The Mac App Store

Bradley Griffin - Jan 10, 2011

Today’s OSX update brings us a Mac App Store for desktop apps.  I’ve already fallen in love with it because it provides a centralized source for all of my app purchases / download history from here on out.

Check out Swackett for fun. I really wish this had a screensaver mode, but it’s kind of great to see how little development effort it takes to build an app that people might use. Alfred is great too if you are troubled by the seconds lost trying to find an app in Finder. I’ve been trying to incorporate this into my workflow for a month or so now.  It’s tough to get started but if you use command-shift-A religiously anyway,  you can make this your Alfred hotkey. A couple others I noticed right away that I’ve used quite a bit are TextWrangler and Sketchbook Pro. I’m looking forward to finding more time-saving applications through this tool rather than the classic word-of-mouth way.

From a dev and business perspective, I think this could end up a similar success story to the iTunes store. With a centralized place to find any level of quality in desktop applications for OSX and a flexible API, the only need remaining is mass developer enrollment. It will also be interesting to see how Cinder plays out since it can target OSX, iPhone and iPad (and more) without writing separate source per build target… as long as you haven’t written anything specific to any one target API.

Thank you, Apple for not _completely_ forgetting about your power users. :)

 

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