The Mac App Store is an amazing resource that I think has to date been underused by many users. Apple released the Mac App Store on January 6th with over 1000 apps for your Mac. With new apps being added every day, this is a great tool available on all Macs running OS 10.6.6 or higher.
Just open up the App Store, click in the search field and type in a term for what you’re looking for, such as “DJ” if you’re looking for DJing apps or “racing” if you’re looking for a racing game. You can sort the apps that come up by relevance to your search, most popular, release date and customer ratings. You will find a wide variety of software at a wide range of prices, with many apps available for free. The Mac App Store is a great go-to resource for quite a bit of your software needs.
One of the best features of the App Store is the customer rating system. The App Store will not allow you to put a rating on an app that you have not purchased, so there are only true users actually giving the ratings, which makes for a more accurate ratings system. You can see what people like or dislike about apps, see if the current version of that app has any bugs and find out what works and what doesn’t.
Not only has the App Store changed the way customers purchase software, it has become the number-one personal computer software market, as Apple announced on June 6th at the World Wide Developers Conference. Because there is such a wide market for the App Store, developers are often able to offer software at lower prices as downloads than in retail packaging. For example, Aperture, Apple’s pro-level photography application, sells for $79.99 in the App Store compared to $199.99 in a retail package.
All in all, Apple has once again revolutionized yet another market with their innovation. With the incredible organization and ease of use of the App Store, you are able to find great apps and download them quickly. Most apps only take a matter of minutes to download over a high-speed Internet connection. In the first 24hrs of the Mac App Store being open, users downloaded over 90,000 apps. This is truly amazing as prior to the Mac App Store, there had never been a place to get software so quickly and from so many different sources.