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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.

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?

Energy saver light bulb in Mac OS X

Having upgraded using software update to Mac OS X 10.5.7 I found that I still had an old fashioned filament type light bulb for the energy saver icon in system preferences. And not the new compact fluorescent energy saver type of bulb icon that has been available on some of the very recent models. Having heard of some other issues relating to the software update version I decided to try the combo updater and sure enough after a smooth install I now have the new energy saver icon.