One Thing Well

A few thoughts, in no particular order, after kicking the tyres for ten minutes:

• It’s pretty, and it’s fast!
• Pricing seems to be all over the place, with some sophisticated apps available for a pittance, and some simple ones priced at a point that makes me think twice.
• There don’t seem to be many (any?) stupid cash-in applications, like the fart apps that litter the iTunes Store.
• Being able to buy iPhoto 11 without the rest of the iLife suite is a boon.
• Some applications—Alfred, Littlesnapper—which I bought in the old-fashioned way are showing up as ‘installed’ in the App Store. Nice. As far as I can tell, this works for apps in /Applications but not ~/Applications, but it may be something developers need to enable. This, counter to what you might expect, doesn’t mean that those apps are integrated into the Mac App Store: if you want the Store to update them, you’ll have to buy them again. Hmmn.
• Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be a way to uninstall apps. Trashing them works, though you’re asked for your password and the app in question hangs around in the ‘Purchases’ pane, waiting to be reinstalled. That’s a pretty big bug/lack of feature.
• The Mac feels a bit more Linuxy today. But the combination of Software Update, the App Store and manually installed applications is going to be confusing, for me at least (cf. clyde -Syua).
• I wonder if the Mac App Store and the iTunes Store’s software section might merge in the future. I think I’d like to use iTunes for media, iPhoto for images and a Mac/iOS App Store for apps. But then I would say that.
• Installed apps are added to your Dock: faintly annoying.
• A note for impecunious bloggers: I’m seeing developers using LinkShare affiliate links on their sites to link to the Mac App Store, but don’t see a way for affiliate programme members to generate those links (beyond hacking URLs, which probably isn’t a good idea).