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Initial Thoughts On The Mac App Store.

The new Apple Mac App Store has arrived today as planned. I was eager to have a good look around it, and this is what I found.

Only some of the applications that I had already installed on my computer from previous independent software purchases are shown as already installed by the Mac App Store. For instance Yojimbo from Barebones and Coda from Panic show as installed, but Marsedit 3 from red sweater and Pixelmator do not.

The apps that I have previously purchased outside of the Mac App Store and that show as installed, do not show me the price that they now cost on the new store. I guess I do not need to know how much they cost if I have already purchased them but what If someone says “that’s a great bit of software how much does it cost?”

The apps that I have previously purchased outside of the Mac App Store do not show in the purchases section of the store. I can see that this is because I have not actually purchased them from the store but it would have been nice if they had showed up so I could take advantage of the update system that the new store should offer.

Because of the above point it would seem that a copy of iLife 11 already owned from the purchase of a new system can only be used on that system, but if a copy of an app that makes up iLife like iPhoto is purchased in the Mac App Store it can be used on multiple systems.

Purchasing a free app such as Textwrangler from Barebones Software via the Mac App Store, allows the app to show in the Purchases section, and overwrites the existing install with no problems.

Apples and Oranges

With the launch of the Apple iPhone on the UK Orange mobile network will they be preloading it with Pink Floyd’s Apples and Oranges

iDisk Turning Blue

Over the last few days I have noticed blue iDisk icons appearing, will my OS X 10.5 Leopard desktop icon be changing soon or is it in readiness for Septembers launch of Snow Leopard. When I took a screen shot on the 10th June for another post the icon bar at the top of the mobileMe web interface looked like this:

Now it looks like this.

The access to iDisk files is now represented by a disk icon instead of the previous folder icon. The icon looks like the desktop icon only it is blue instead of purple. The settings has also changed to bringit in line with the OS X desktop and iphone settings icons. I have also noticed that several images on the apple site iDisk / MobileMe section, in particular those relating to the soon to be released iPhone application for access to iDisk are featuring a blue idisk icon. One of these images is shown here.

So will I soon see the end of this purple iDisk icon on my desktop and the introduction of a new blue iDisk icon?

How do you Google for iPhone 3GS ? (part 2)

Just a short update to my earlier post How do you Google for iPhone 3G S?This post from theAppleBlog clears the matter up slightly, at least it should when searching for information from official sources.

How to recover from iPhone Remote Wipe

Having used the MobileMe Remote Wipe feature on my original iPhone, I was left with a phone that would only show the apple logo for a few seconds at power on and then do nothing. Resetting did not work and trying to recover from iTunes as I had expected seemed impossible as the iPhone was not even showing up in iTunes. With a fair amount of Googling I found the answer thanks to a thread on the Apple Discussion Forums.

“

1. Wake your iphone up so you see the apple logo.
2. Hold down the power button (the one on top) and the home button until the screen goes black.
3. This turns the phone off, don’t keep holding the button or the phone will restart.
4. Now that the phone is off, press and hold the home button.
5. While holding the home button connect your phone back to your computer, continue to hold the home button until itunes says it has found a phone that needs to be restored.
6. restore phone.”

How do you Google for iPhone 3G S ?

When I search for iPhone 3G S I am referring to the new iPhone 3G S due to be launched on the 19th June 2009, the one where the “S” stands for speed not plural. With the previous model released last year called iPhone 3G the internet is littered with references to iPhone 3Gs. Google does not differentiate between searches with lowercase and capital letters, so searching 3Gs or 3GS does not make any difference. So should I put a space between the 3G and the S? Well the results do differ slightly between 3GS and 3G S, but not in any usable way as it seems no one else is really sure whether there should be a space between the 3G and the S when referring to the latest model.

So is this an oversight by Apple in the naming of their new product, that will result in customers having great difficulty in finding information about their exact model of iPhone. Or is it a stroke of genius as the internet is already full of references and has been for a year, to their new product that was only publicly named last week?

If this is the case, with internet references now appearing to iPhone 3G S’s is the next model of iphone to be called the iPhone 3G SS, speed and style maybe?