Apple (AAPL) has made it official: the Mac App Store is open, and it looks… well, a whole lot like the iTunes App Store we’ve been enjoying on other Apple devices.
There are more than 1,000 apps in the store already, including a lot of favorites like Mac versions of Angry Birds and Bejeweled 3. The new store also packs Twitter 2, a new version of the popular app for Twitter.com that’s very popular, and very useful, on the iPad.
All in all, the experience looks a lot like what was expected: this is your Mac, iPad-style. A lot of the apps vary in price and content, but it seems like Apple’s push toward online software sales on the small and large scale is a pretty successful one. The Mac App Store looks and functions as well as its counterpart in iTunes, granting you quick access to the programs you want.
Apple has worked in a few cool features — after you update your Mac OS X software to get the Mac App Store to download, your computer will add scanning through the store to the solutions it employs whenever you wind up with a file you don’t have the right software to open. That’ll be nice, considering the amount of time I’ve wasted in the path trying to run down what a file extension even means, much less the program to make it work. And like iTunes, once you’ve downloaded and installed a Mac app, you can download it again if you need to — and purchasing an app once makes it available to all your Mac computers.
There’s a list of featured Mac Apps on Apple.com, and for the most part they look really sharp. Most notably (and happily), the apps we’re seeing seem to be pretty well filled-out; they’re bigger programs than one would expect to find on the iPad, which was a fear at least for me when we first started hearing about the Mac App Store.
The whole affair seems cool, but I’m cautiously optimistic. I haven’t had a chance to really peruse the catalogue of apps available, but it still seems to me that Apple needs to emphasize quality over quantity. Great — there’s 1,000 apps in there. I’d rather see a Mac App Store with 20 apps, all of which I’d consider downloading, than 100,000 that users will have to wade through to find gems.
