Many software packages from 3rd party developers are released on the Mac App Store everyday and Apple is trying to take advantage of that. Apple mentioned that boxed software takes up a large amount of shelf space in the company’s retail stores, and software is less profitable than devices like the iPhone or iPad.

Apple also reduced it’s suite of games available in stores, cutting down over 32 games to only 8 and removed some products from its stores to clear shelf space, including printers and scanners. Hardware products are still available upon request, but softwares will be available entirely on the Mac App Store.

Apple seems to be taking it’s products in another direction, removing anything extraneous from it’s lineup and focusing specifically on the product itself. One move earlier in the year, that defined this change was the introduction of Wireless Syncing to iTunes from an iOS device. Changes such as these are putting Apple on a new landscape and strengthening it’s iOS App Store, Mac App Store, and ultimately their products. Other boxed software packages being removed are:

MC171 Apple Remote Desktop 3.3 10 Managed Systems
MC172 Apple Remote Desktop 3.3 Unlimited Managed Systems
D4222 Xsan 2 VL 10+
D4223 Xsan 2 VL 10+ EDU INST
MC186 Xsan 2 Single License
MC189 Xsan 2 Media Set
D2977 Xsan 2 MAINT 36 MOS SINGLE
D3132 Xsan 2 MAINT 36 MOS SINGLE EDU INST
D2966 Xsan 2 MAINT 36 MOS 10+
D3133 Xsan 2 MAINT 36 MOS 10+ EDU INST
MB957 Aperture 3 Retail
MC455 Aperture 3 ZU Retail
MB959 Aperture 3 Upgrade
MC456 Aperture 3 ZU Upgrade
D4855 APERTURE 3 TRIAL ACTIV KEY RETAIL
D4857 APERTURE 3 TRIAL UPGRADE ACTIV KEY
MC623 iLife ’11 Retail
MC625 iLife ’11 Family Pack

{via AppleInsider}

Supermarket Mania 2 is a time management game in the Mac App Store that has been successful on iOS devices and does not disappoint on the Mac. You play the role of Nikki who operates a successful supermarket and Uncle Ross suggests that you should take talents to “Tinseltown” and try and revive his troubled supermarket chain. Tinseltown is the big time so you decide to do so. Torg, competition that you have beaten, plots his revenge in Tinseltown as well. The game follows you along the journey with comic book like story lines and awesome time management gameplay.

The setting changes quite often in Supermarket Mania 2. The game touts 6 settings: downtown, suburbs, beaches, ski resort and even the tallest building in town. This along with eighty levels ensures that the game stays fresh and keeps you coming back for more. This amount of settings changes and levels adds a ton of replay value to a very fun game.

The gameplay [] is fairly simple but has tons of variables and keeps the game flowing quite nicely. Your goal is to serve the customers of your new supermarket in a timely fashion while keeping your shelves stocked and the supermarket clean. Sound simple enough? The first level is just that, simple. However with success comes a higher degree of difficulty. As you successfully serve guests each day, your supermarket grows in popularity and more and more patrons come to be served. You also begin baking croissants, brew coffee, make milkshakes, squeeze fresh juice and serve hot pizza to customers. These processes have several steps and take a little time to figure out a nice strategy. You must tackle these tasks while cleaning the supermarket, running the cash register and keeping the shelves and baskets stocked. It can get pretty hectic in there so stay on your toes.

Just when you get the hang of all of these tasks the game will throw you more difficult tasks. These tasks range like delivering goods to the neighborhood, battle shoplifters and serving impatient celebrities. However, some of these tasks are made easier by the game allowing you to hire assistants, upgrade equipment, upgrade décor and even purchase bonuses that help with keeping the customers happy such as cookies. These things can come in very handy because you have to keep the customers happy throughout their experience in your store. Keeping the shelves stocked, the store clean and the difficult items made you can keep most people happy but from time to time when you are overwhelmed by customers, cookies save the day. You can also purchase a cleaning supply that instantly cleans the supermarket. A tip to the wise, try to get the store stocked and cleaned towards the end of the timer as you will receive a bonus. It took me a few rounds to figure this out but every dollar counts. The game takes many turns and always has you re-evaluating how you manage your time.

The scoring is very simple. You get money for the number of customers you serve as well as an amount for your performance and if you are able to have the store cleaned and stocked at the end of the day. If you manage your time wisely this is not a problem but it is much easier if you develop a system and try to stick to it. The game will have you continually adapting your system but it certainly helps to have one. You of course always have to keep an eye out for your enemy Torg!

Visually and audibly the game is marvelous. The visuals are cartoon based but look great. The animations never seem out of place or glitchy and everything flows quite well. The audio is always changing and the sound effects help designate what is happening and what customers are doing. Overall the game has great presentation and is very, very clean. I was very impressed with the overall package this game has to offer.

Pros

• Lots of Levels and Settings Changes
• Great Visual & Audio Presentation
• Ever-Changing Gameplay
• Addictive Gameplay

Cons

• Ability to play my music would be cool
• More customers

$6.99
Category: Games
Released: Mar 24, 2011
Version: 1.0
Size: 170 MB
Languages: English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish
Seller: G5 Entertainment AB
© 2011 G5 Entertainment AB
Rated 4+
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later

Gallery

Obliteration [rating: 4.5/5]

It’s been 10 years since Zombies first appeared, laying waste to everything. Those lucky enough to be away from the main continents were able to regroup in Greenland and survive.

This is how Jonathan Mulcahy introduces his iOS and Mac OS X physics game, which has an art style where everything on screen is styled as if it is drawn with coloured pencils on graph paper, and then cut out to be arranged into objects in your play area. At first grasp the game looks fun, but seems awfully simple. How does it hold up when being played by a hardcore gamer like me!?

I was dubious. I have to be honest. When I first fired up Obliteration, notwithstanding its $1.99 (on OS X) or $0.99 (on iOS) price, I honestly thought that this game was not going to hold my attention for a reasonable amount of time. How wrong was I!

An hour later both my wife and I were crowded around my work MacBook Pro, taking turns to alternately try and blow up enough buildings the right way to get that damn white line below the annoying red one! Frustration was interspersed with giggles as we alternately messed up, or launched zombies into orbit with well placed bombing runs.

Obliteration is super simple to grasp. It doesn’t even need a touch screen or a mouse really. You could play it with one finger, either tapping a mouse button, or a touch screen on iOS. You have four bombs, and a plane that flies in bombing runs back and forth across the sky. Below it is a city, full of tiny zombies. You do not control the plane at all. You simply tap your mouse button once to release a bomb, and then either wait for it to hit the ground, or (as we gradually learned) perhaps go for an air blast by tapping the mouse button while a bomb is still falling past buildings.

Once your four bombs are spent, you should have obliterated the buildings below, and scattered their various parts around the screen. But all of them must be below a red line drawn across the screen on each level – or you do not progress. And that’s it.

Each level in Obliteration seems carefully crafted to vary the level of difficulty involved in turning the city below into enough well spaced rubble that you achieve the goal required to move onto the next level. I was quite surprised to note on the developer’s blog that they were randomly generated – and think that there is a little more to it than that.

Some buildings are tall and thin. Some are small and fat. On some levels you have radio masts, or water towers. Some levels have islands so you can blast chunks of building into the water to get rid of them. Later levels have more densely packed buildings, and it is possible to blow all the buildings over with one bomb, and then stand them back up again with a next blast! Which is extremely frustrating!

All the time hapless zombies are running around, in confusion, as you obliterate their hiding places. If you get lucky you can send one of them flying off the screen at a million miles an hour, or even up in the sky higher than your plane goes! Which is strangely satisfying. But actually serves no real purpose! It’s even funnier then they fall back down past everything a few seconds later! Nice touch there.

Another nice touch, that adds tension, is that at the end of each level, as the blast from your last bomb dies down, and the last pieces of rubble settle, the game is already starting its check to see if you have raised the city low enough. You can sometimes either complete or fail a level based on whether a chunk of twisted metal or concrete settles into a nook or cranny in the carnage on screen just in time! *sigh*

As you progress from level to level there are subtle changes to the backgrounds of each environment also. Some levels have clouds and abstract backgrounds. Some cities are a doddle to obliterate. And others can take quite a lot of planning; requiring you to blow the tops off tall skyscrapers with air blasts to thin the level out, and then pummelling the ground with your last couple of bombs to mop up, for example.

I literally had to tear myself away from this game to come write this review. And whilst Obliteration doesn’t have the depth of a full blown desktop computer game, it is only $1.99 after all. And for that price it’s a great fun little time-waster (and stress reliever) for your desktop machine. I also expect it is an awesome little app for any iOS device you might own. I hope there will be an Obliteration II with some further development of this idea. But until then Obliteration will do just fine!

Heartily Recommended.

Pros

• Addictive.
• Simple, but fun gamely.
• You can launch zombies into orbit!
• Tasteful take on the hand-drawn look and feel.

Cons

• Very addictive!
• Would like to see a little more diversity in an update.

$1.99 (View in Mac App Store)
Category: Games
Updated: Mar 03, 2011
Current Version: 1.7
Size: 17.1 MB
Language: English
Seller: Jonathan Mulcahy
© 2011 Jonathan Mulcahy
Rated 4+
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 or later

Inkub HD [rating: 3/5]

Inkub HD for Mac is a kind of tower defense game, which is set in the incubator rooms of an alternate world. It features a different look from most games of its genre, and bright colourful graphics with a nice intro. I took it for a whirl to see how it plays on OS X.

The main menu of Inkub has a nice bunch of menu features, including different play modes and information on enemies and weapons – both of which you can unlock more of as you progress.

Here are the key game modes:

Adventure

In the Adventure Mode you will be in charge of the incubators for 40 rounds spread across 5 different worlds. Each world has 8 rounds in which you will unlock weapons, special powers and enemies.

Survival

Choose a scenario amongst the 5 available and try to keep your incubator safe as long as possible. Each new wave of enemies will be tougher and you will need all your skills to achieve the best scores.

The general look and feel, as well as the execution of the game’s interface is very much like an iOS app. There are iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch versions of Inkub, and this is probably a text book example of a game that is portable across all the platforms Apple make. So that is what it appears as if the developer has done. Nothing wrong with that. It is simply an observation. But unfortunately because of this my first impression of Inkub HD was that it was a little simplistic for a desktop game. And this initial impression was borne out as I dug deeper.

Inkub HD features 3 difficulty levels and 5 different worlds each with 8 rounds.
You can also rotate the play area to reveal hidden tubes, and activate some hidden rounds.

Gameplay is solid, and revolves around the usual fare in tower defence games; where one strategically places weaponry to defend your base. Except in this case the base is an egg in an incubator, and the enemies that you place weaponry to defend against are crawling down vent tubes connected to your incubating egg.

As the game progresses you unlock more versatile weapons, and your incubating room gets more vent pipes. At the same time the enemies get more abundant and also change in variety.

All of this is played out against the backdrop of a planet, and a gradually more cluttered incubator room.

Sound effects are cool. And the look and feel of everything is done competently. And this game would look great on a smaller screen I expect. But even on a 17″ laptop display the graphics, whilst well drawn, are too big, and the animations are too clunky for my tastes.

I was not really keen on the way that the vent tubes had some sections that were impossible to see through. This meant that enemies could disappear and reappear going round bends in tubes, which is actually a fun twist. But also made the play area, that is already constrained to the vent tubes, feel all the more sparse on a big screen with lots of irrelevant atmospheric activity going on around it.

Overall I found Inkub HD very easy. And a little too slow in its progression.
For a kid, playing a tower defence game for the first time, Inkub HD would probably be a great introduction to this genre on either the Mac or iPad – while a little too simplistic for an adult. On an iPod Touch or iPhone I think it would be quite a good game for anyone in an idle moment.

But overall as a Mac App, as cheap and as cheerful and as well implemented as this game is, it’s a little too “blaa”.

The Good

• Great game for a younger player who wants a Tower Defense intro.
• Well presented, and professionally crafted.
• Looks great, despite being a little too bland visually.

The Not So Good

• Way too easy as a game.
• Actual gameplay area feels constrained sometimes.
• Looks way too simple on a big screen.

$3.99 (View in iTunes)
Category: Games
Released: Mar 01, 2011
Version: 1.0.0
Size: 22.4 MB
Language: English
Seller: 46 To Shinjuku Medialab, S.L.
© 46 To Shinjuku Medialab, S.L.
Rated 9+ for the following:
Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later

Chopper 2 [rating: 4/5]

Chopper was, and by all accounts still is, a big hit on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad; selling in numbers in excess of 350,000 copies. It was also well received critically, and more importantly by players. Chopper 2 is more of the same, but with a little more meat to the environment graphics and some pretty cool control and output features..

In essence Chopper 2 is a side scrolling shooter, with a little bit of rescue and some annoying birds thrown in for good measure (the new zombies in games apparently), and it’s all set against some quite pretty renderings of some fun and interesting locations..

I only learned this week that Chopper was originally a Mac game long before it was an iOS app. And with the advent of the Mac App Store David Frampton, the developer behind the game, has pushed out an OS X version of Chopper 2 as one of the first games available via Apple’s new OS X software distribution solution.

We checked it out to see if the game translates back from iOS, accelerometers and a touch screen to it’s original roots.. the desktop!

With Chopper 2 David Frampton took a while longer than he first intended to get his sequel to market, and the polish on the environments, whilst still fairly basic, shows. There is a lot more depth to the landscapes we scroll through, and although the majority of the trees are 2D, buildings are pseudo 3D and there is liberal use of fog and environmental effects to make the whole thing look very pleasing; especially against the backdrops of mountains and neon city sky-scapes. Parallax and judicious use of fog effects give us a really enjoyable feeling of movement through the game worlds which also feature a very pleasing and immersive draw depth.

Chopper 2 on the Mac is basically the same game you can buy for any iOS device, but upscaled to desktop screen size. A maximum of 2560×1600 pixels is possible. And the graphics do the game justice, even though for a desktop game those graphics are on the simple side these days.

In total there are 12 kinds of locations, from canyons through desert scenes, cityscapes and more pastoral country areas with mountain backdrops. And the game boasts 36 missions, and a 17 minute soundtrack. More than enough to keep you entertained.

Missions vary, but include straight destruction levels, defence missions, and search and rescue opportunities, among other entertaining scenarios. The whole thing starts out with only a training mission being available, which you unlock to progress onwards from. So you don’t have to worry about being thrown in at the deep end right off the bat. At each level progression you are presented with a set of floating instructions about your mission, which hover over the game environment. It is a very striking effect on a mobile device. I liked it a lot. And it’s ok, but not quite as impressive for some reason on the desktop version.

Gameplay is more of the same from Chopper, beefed up a little as you’d expect for a sequel. Missiles, bombs and explosions are all rendered and animated to good effect. And the enemy tanks and soldiers are presented clearly, with some nice overlays to enhance their visibility. Sometimes though I wanted a bit more complexity than just the sideways scrolling gives and the landscape hints at, but that’s just me. Having said that though, Chopper 2 is not a cake walk. The game offers a challenge to the player which is a lot of fun – and can get quite frenetic from time to time.

In Chopper 2 you meet quite a few different types of enemies: Troops, tanks, anti-aircraft emplacements, and depending on the mission at hand, you are armed with a variety of weapons; guided missiles, cannons and bombs.

The real question is does it work as well with a keyboard and mouse as it does on the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad? Yes, and no. It’s playable, but some of the magic is gone, in my opinion, when you play it without an accelerometer, or particularly without a gyroscope.

Also, Mobile games, for better or worse, are considerably more simple than games we expect to see on our desktop. And I would have liked to have seen a little more effort and depth put into the OS X version. Had it been I would have happily paid more to play it. To be completely fair it is not an expensive game. So it is still good value, it’s just that I wish David had “gone for it” a bit more.

As it stands playing Chopper 2 on a Mac can be kind of like playing it on an iPad or a computer. You can either use the mouse and keyboard which are OK, or use your iPhone as a remote control. The latter feature being something that hitherto has only been possible with an iPhone and an iPad. If you don’t have an iPad then perhaps that is a good reason to get Chopper 2 for your Mac; because you can then experience what all the lucky people with an iPad and an iPhone have. Ultimately Chopper 2 is much more fun when you use a device with some kind of motion device, it simply works better.

Right now Chopper 2 on the Mac App Store is 99 cents for a limited “launch sale” period. It does have a bug which stops you being able to remote control the game from an iOS device – that all important killer feature that sets it apart from a lot of other cheap bite sized games. But that is easily solved by logging all the users on your Mac out of MobileMe, and a fix is promised to be forthcoming very soon.

For a dollar or two, if you don’t have it for iOS, then it’s worth getting. If you already have it for iOS and it’s on your iPhone or iPod Touch then you might want to buy it again so you can play using your iOS device as a remote control. That would certainly be cheaper than buying an iPad!

But if you are expecting a new version of the game with more features and more depth than the iOS version the you will be disappointed.

Pros

• Remote Control system is a nice feature for iPhone / iPod Touch owners.
• It’s a good value for money game, which plays well and is fun.

Cons

• It still feels a little 2D at times.
• Bombs are quite hard to target effectively.
• It’s cheap, which is a good thing, because it’s not really a desktop title in terms of features.

$0.99 (View in Mac App Store)
Category: Games
Updated: Jan 13, 2011
Current Version: 1.2.1
Size: 152 MB
Language: English
Seller: David Frampton
© 2010 Majic Jungle Software
Rated 9+ for the following:
Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later

Gallery

After reading on Twitter how OS X 10.6.6 had been released and that it held the key to unlocking some App Store goodness I rushed, well, meandered home to fire off the update. Much downloading and rebooting later and I’m sat staring at the now familiar icon behind which there resides a world of applications waiting for my money. I stab at the little icon of loveliness and wait. And wait.

It appears Apple’s servers got a bit of a hammering today, who could see that coming!? Quitting and restarting the app solved the issue. Hurrah!

Once in, the whole experience is instantly familiar whilst also feeling completely foreign. The familiarity comes from the store layout, icons and ads. If you’ve ever used the App Store on an iPad, or indeed inside iTunes then the chances are you’ll feel right at home. The interesting thing though is how it just feels…odd.

Now this is where I try desperately to stop myself from getting carried away and coming across as a miserable, App Store hating crazy person. But stick with me, I’ll come back to what I don’t like later on.

Sat looking at the front page (is it a page?) right now I see a huge ad for Pixelmator across the top, a list of paid-for and free apps below, and charts for both on the right hand side. All pretty much par for the course.

In the menu bar across the top we have the expected Featured, Top Charts, Categories and Updates tabs. Apple has also thrown in a ‘Purchased Apps’ option here, where perhaps predictably the store lists everything you’ve downloaded – including free stuff. Useful indeed.

From here there’s not a great deal to look at. You flick through the charts, check out the apps and buy things. It’s an App Store. It works.

Now onto why it’s not all (double) rainbows and unicorns…

The first issue people will come across is the ‘I already own an app and the App Store doesn’t know’ problem. Obviously this means updates won’t be handled by the store, and you’re left with a stand-alone app that needs updating the ‘old fashioned’ way.

Now if we’re talking about a free app it’s not really an issue. Just download via the App Store and you’re golden. The old app gets replaced and now updates are handled as expected. The problem here is that if the app is a paid-for item then this won’t work. Unless you want to pay twice, of course.

Don’t get me wrong here, I know this isn’t a world-ending problem, but it’s messy. I had hoped that there would be a way for the App Store to check existing licenses and import them, making the whole thing THE PLACE to handle your apps. iTunes for applications if you will. Alas, I was hoping for too much.

My other downer is something that I suspect is more an issue with the way I’m now accustomed to using the iOS store.

Looking through the categories of paid apps you find yourself looking at semi-pro apps priced at semi-pro price points. Alongside those are super cheap, what I like to call ‘throwaway’ products. Here one of two things happens: either the good apps look overpriced, or the cheap apps find themselves elevated to a level they just don’t deserve. On iOS this isn’t such a problem as we’ve witnessed a race to the bottom – developers trying to make apps as cheap as possible to drive sales. This isn’t going to happen with a $99 application and they might not benefit from being lumped in with $0.99 ‘competitors’. Whether this is a real problem or me thinking too much remains to be seen. Time will tell, and I have been known to be wrong before. Once.

Before I leave you to get back to Angry Birds on the big screen, I just want to mention a tweet I saw earlier from the guys over at Evernote.

“Early Mac App Store Effect: Rate of new users on Mac is 1800% higher than normal. Wow.”

That, right there, is why the Mac App Store will be a success despite any flaws or potential issues it might have. Stores aid discovery, and people discovering apps means people paying for them.

What makes this great news for us is this: more apps sold equals many more, and hopefully better apps for us to play with in the future.

Now, what shall I buy next?

I’m a huge fan of gaming on my iOS device, and I love some of the great games that the App Store has to offer for my iPhone and iPad. With the launch of Apple’s new Mac App Store today, we can expect some of the most successful iOS games and applications to make the move to Mac, where their developers can expect even more success. Today’s launch of the Mac App Store saw over 1000 apps available at launch, 74 of which came in under the ‘Games’ category. Here’s a little list of the games now available for your Mac that you may be familiar with from iOS:

• Ancient Frog – $4.99
• Angry Birds – $4.99
• Chopper 2 – $0.99
• Compression – $0.99
• Enigmo – $14.99
• Enigmo 2 – $14.99
• Flight Control HD – $4.99
• Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 – $49.99
• Osmos – $9.99
• Pac-Man – $4.99
• Peggle – $9.99
• Pinball HD – $2.99
• Splode – $4.99
• The Incident – $4.99
• Toki Tori – $4.99
• Zen Bound 2 – $4.99

Although the Mac platform isn’t as novel as iOS due to its lack of touchscreen and accelerometer, we can still expect many of the great games and applications we love on our iDevices to be just as enjoyable on our Macs. What’s also great about a download-only software store, is that we can expect the prices we pay for the games we love to be a lot lower than what we may have to stump up for a physical disk in fancy packaging.

Apple’s own Aperture premium photography software is a great example of this: order the boxed software from the Apple Online Store and you can expect to pay $199, downloading it from the Mac App Store, however, will only cost you $79.99.

Thanks to the Mac App Store, we can expect the future of gaming on our Macs to be a little brighter. The recent release of Steam for Mac was a blessing for gamers who chose to use a Mac as their primary computer, and the Mac App Store will only give them a greater library of games to choose from, as well as a better variety.

In a stroke of marketing genius Apple has unleashed the Mac App Store on the world on the same day as key announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. A show they don’t attend, but most of the worlds tech companies do, as well as most of the world’s tech press. And yet on Twitter, at least, you’d barely know that CES was going on as people all chat about Apple’s new software distribution network.

Once Macintosh users have downloaded an OS X operating system update the Mac App Store becomes an integral part of their daily OS X experience on their desktop machine. In many ways the Mac App Store app is what the iTunes App Store should be. It is a beautiful stand alone app dedicated to downloading OS X desktop apps; free from the clutter that iOS App Store users have to endure with the bloated and incorrectly named iTunes app.

The user experience overall is very similar to that in the App Store portion of iTunes, and it stands to reason that perhaps Apple in future will migrate iOS app purchases to a similar stand alone app, or even as part of a combo Apple App Store app. The process of downloading apps is very reminiscent of the iOS experience, as apps appear in your dock once purchased, and display their download progress with a pretty little blue bar before permanently installing themselves automagically in your Applications folder, and on your dock.

You can delete or uninstall the apps by dragging it to the trash and then authenticating with admin username and password. You can also move the app from Trash back to the ‘Applications’ folder if you’d like to restore the application.

The launch has not been without some teething problems though, which is most likely a function of the Mac based internet at large hammering Apple’s servers for both the OS X update required to run the Mac App Store, and also to download cool apps like Twitter’s new “Twitter” for OS X app – which is beautiful, by the way.

There are a plethora of OS X apps, including Apple’s own Aperture 3, which are available at very attractive (for desktop) prices. And in many ways it is re-assuring for developers that at least for the moment the same “race to the bottom” with pricing is not occurring in the Mac App Store. This may be in part because the Mac App Store is not the only place that developers can sell apps. It remains to be seen how long it is before the App Store becomes the main location that newer (and perhaps more experienced) Macintosh users go to buy apps, and then if a price war then erupts. But for now everything seems rosy in Apple’s latest online retail venture.

Have you tried out the Mac App Store yet? What do you think? Let us know in the comments…

Apple has been successful in revolutionizing the way users discover and install applications on their iOS devices. They are  now ready to bring what they learnt from the App Store for iPhone and iPad to the Mac.

Steve Jobs, during ‘Back to the Mac’ keynote event announced that Apple will be launching the ‘Mac App Store’ which will be compatible with Lion and Snow Leopard. The Mac App Store will provide a marketplace for all developers registered with Apple to sell their Mac Apps on the new App Store. Developers will be offered 70/30 split (in favor of the developers) the same deal which is currently offered to the iOS developers.

Some of the main features of the Mac App Store are :

• Best place to discover apps
• One click downloads
• Free and Paid apps
• Automatic installation
• Automatic updates

I think the automatic installation and the ability to discover some of the best apps for your Mac will certainly help the new app store in becoming yet another success for Apple. The demo during the keynote event showed how easy it was to install an app with one click which is an excellent example of Apple’s expertise in designing simple software that ‘just works’

The new store will also encourage developers to participate in the ‘Mac Developer Program’ as Apple’s store for mac apps will provide them with the opportunity to reach out to the masses.

Apple will launch the Mac App Store in 90 days from today and will start accepting developer submissions in November. It was certainly a very wise decision by Apple to allow people using Snow Leopard to access the store as that would help in reaching out to a much wider audience.

Developer of the popular game for iPhone called WordCrasher in a recent tweet expressed his interest in exploring the idea of bringing his game to the Mac which indicates that in a matter of months we might see our favorite iPhone apps and games making their way to the Mac!