Crazy Apple News Site

Ever wonder what I do when I’m feeling bored and creative? Well, sometimes I write Interactive Fiction. If you’re looking for something to laugh at, why not take a whack at my first IF effort, Clichés? You can play it in your browser for free, provided you’ve nothing better to do and are willing to put up with the kind of stupid inconsistencies and bugs I’m sure are still in there. But hey, text adventures are supposed to be irritating and difficult!

Today we thought we’d do an in-depth, hard hitting review of the Mac App Store, Apple’s newest way to cash in on developers distribute software. But then we remembered we write  a humor blog, not one of those Gawker monstrosities. So instead we’re just going to make fun of it.¹

(App) Store? Huh. What is it good for?

The easy answer of course is “absolutely nothing”. But the problem with the path of “the easy answer” is twofold: first, it curtails actual thought, instead lulling us to sleep with its facile nature. Also, it makes for really short articles.

True, at first glance, the App Store doesn’t seem to add a lot to the end user’s experience. It gives you automatic updating…kind of. It’s automatic in the sense of “you get notified that there are updates every time you open the App Store, then you have to download them by yourself” instead of the sense of “happens, you know, automatically”. True, the Sparkle framework handles this much easier² and prompts you to update when you open the actual app, instead of the App Store, but that’s not the point. The point is that now the user, any user, can find a wealth of apps all in one place, without mucking about on the dirty messy scary internet. So that’s a benefit to the user.

Well, it would be, except the majority of the apps on the App Store are, well, terrible. Sure, you’ve got all the good ones, Like Scrivener, Mars Edit³ All of Apple’s awesome software, The Omni group’s usual offerings, etc. etc.

But these are well-established players in the game of Mac Software. For the most part they’re in the store just because it’s easy, and it’s more-or-less free advertising⁴ and a pretty high chance that they’ll be a featured app, and that just can’t be bad. But what about the stuff that’s never been available anywhere but the App Store? Are there any real standout players that are just getting into the game, and are getting into it via the shiny new Apple-sanctioned distribution channel?

Nope.

Sure, we’ve got a lot of iPad apps coming “Back to the Mac”. Apparently the refactor from magical touch-screen device to revolutionary and finely tuned desktop computer isn’t that difficult, and there are all kinds of Angry Birds on the mac now.⁵ But what about the rest of the store? Well, it’s…the kind of thing we’ve come to expect on the iOS app store. A tiny little app that costs you $.99 and lets you track your weight is acceptable on a phone, but it just looks stupid on a desktop. So what happened? Why aren’t we getting the kind of buy-in to the Mac App Store that made the iOS App Store such a huge deal and spawned a thousand copycats? Let’s look at it from the software creator’s point of view.

A Day in the Life of a Developer

So there you are, a fervent Apple fan boy or girl who has the best possible idea for a new app: the Kittenizer. Soon people worldwide will be posting pictures made better by the artistic and subtle addition of giant Impact-font additions to their images, all drawn from their Twitter and Facebook feeds. The muse grips you, and you must get your program out to the world. But how?

Well, who’s your audience? If you want to write in a cross-platform language, like Java or Flex, then you’re locked out of the Mac App Store. No big deal, you’ll write a Windows version later.

So, that means you’re learning Cocoa and Objective-C. Cool. So you start writing your app, and genius that you are, you have it ready to go in less than eight hours.⁶ Your beta testers⁷ all rave about the app, and it hasn’t had a major crash in minutes. So now you’re off to the races! Let’s get that App in the App Store and out where everyone can know the joy of your buzzword-powered masterpiece.

Not so fast! First you need to cough up $99. Just like the iOS Store, there’s a bar that says “you must be this well off to ride this ride” before you get into the Magic Kingdom. So you go to your beta testers and some other friends and scrape together the money, pay Apple, and make your way through their steps to get your product out there. And after you submit your app, you sit back, looking forward to the moment when your app goes on sale, when you’re getting rewarded for your brilliance. How knows, maybe you’ll even end up as a featured app, or maybe you’ll get a huge award at next year’s WWDC! Maybe your app will even get–

Rejected.

What? Why? You scan the email, and, it’s insanely vague. Don’t worry, young one, you’re not alone. Still undeterred, you spend a few minutes getting Sparkle built into your app⁸ and a few hours setting up a system that handles activations and whatnot. Finally, just before midnight the Kittenizer is up and for sale on your own personal website.

In the End…

It looks like we’re really really down on the Mac App Store. And while we don’t think it’s the best idea in the world, it’s not entirely terrible. But a platform that’s antagonistic to both the developer and the customer is a platform that could use some more love and attention, or else it’s going to end up like the Zune Marketplace, and nobody wants that.

1. Which may or may not involve hitting things hard. [↩]
2. and doesn’t cost the developer 30% of their sale price [↩]
3. which I would be using to write this post if I could afford a license. [↩]
4. App Store costs aren’t much higher than maintaining your own distribution channel or using other third parties, and are much lower than selling software the old fashioned way, with discs and boxes and stuff. Look, let’s not get into this here, okay? [↩]
5. Angry Birds just looks stupid on a 23” screen, by the way [↩]
6. I called this section “A Day in the Life” and I mean to stick to it. Even if it means becoming really really implausible in the process. [↩]
7. your mom, your sister, and your sister’s boyfriend [↩]
8. it doesn’t require any code changes, it lives in Interface Builder [↩]

Cupertino Apple announced today that they are “concerned” that the number of Full-Screen Writing Programs may soon be more than the Apple Ecosystem can handle, and that they will be declaring an “Open Season” on the little blighters.

“It started out innocently enough,” said Sina Tamaddon, VP of Applications at Apple, Inc. “We had WriteRoom, which was a nice little app. I mean, get serious, it’s TextEdit stretched out and colored. But really, no harm done. Later some of the bigger writing apps, like Ulysses and Scrivener added full screen views. Heck, we added it to Pages. But now these little full-screen text editor programs are popping up like mice. OmmWriter Dana added some pretty music and background graphics, but this new Byword? It’s like Pages on the iPad for the Mac. We should have come up with that!

“The full-Screen Writing program epidemic is a small part of the larger threat,” said Dr. Weisman, a made-up pompous guy with leather patches on his elbows. No, no tweed jacket. “Like any ecosystem, the Mac app ecosystem needs to maintain a delicate balance. Too many graphics programs and the businessmen wander off. Too many spreadsheets, and there go all your artists,” at this point Weisman started to giggle. “I’m just kidding. Artists would be eaten alive on a PC. Two seconds after they brought it home it’d be so full of viruses and spyware they’d have to unplug it and take the battery out just to get it to stop shouting obscene phrases at them. But that’s beside the point. The point is, the number of writing programs currently in the mac ecosystem is threatening that delicate balance. Scrivener, we’ve got nothing against Scrivner. And Pagehand, we like Pagehand.¹ But these newcomers are starting to crowd out the long-standing, upstanding, outstanding old guys like NisusWriter or Mellel. Sure, the new ones are easy to use. But they don’t have history, or deep roots, and they don’t keep people from flowing downhill into PC territory.”

“Yes, exactly,” Tamaddon said, wresting control back from the somewhat creepy doctor. “so, starting in the summer of 2011, we will be selling tags for hunters to remove certain Full-Screen Writing programs from the ecosystem. We want to make sure it’s done humanely, no porting a program to Linux or anything like that. We’re thinking that tags will begin at $40, after you join the Apple Hunter Program, which is quite reasonable at $99/year, and includes a license for XCode 4.”

Tamaddon mentioned that Scott Forstall would be monitoring this program closely, and if it proved successful would be offering a similar system for “all those dang iOS ToDo list apps.”

1. Apparently Dr. Weisman also likes repeating himself. [↩]

An unseen roadblock has arisen in the adoption of Apple’s latest hardware offering.
“Magic? Pfaugh!” said Nigel Rutheford, a bland, portly tax adjuster from Norwich. “When you get older, my boy, you’ll realize there’s no such thing. I won’t have this kind of nonsense brought into my home!” He shook his huge florid face to emphasize this last point, then sent his young charge to his room.

“I wish my uncle could see that ‘bluetooth connectivity’ is technological, not mythological,” simpered “Perry H.”, Rutheford’s orphaned nephew. “And I really should have known better than to tell him about the new ‘gestures’ feature. And I really really shouldn’t have mentioned the ‘two-finger gesture’ first.”

“This problem seems to be an epidemic amongst a certain breed of cardigan-wearing Britons with large-haired wives, ” said Eve Bite, Apple’s Product Adoption Liason in the UK. “For some reason the very word ‘magic’ makes them go all irrational and 1950′s-ish. They seem to feel that ‘magic’ leads to talking animals, flying confections, and socially embarrasing hijinks. Naturally, this isn’t the image we want associated with Apple’s products.”

Nobody at Apple’s Cupertino offices was available for comment, although we’re pretty sure we caught a glimpse of Steve Jobs hurredly doffing a flowing purple robe with mystical symbols.