A wish list for the Apple Mac App Store

Apple has just released a new version of OS X - version 10.6.8 and it should be the last Snow Leopard update before Lion is released. So what is in this latest update and is it worth downloading?

One of the things that is does is to enhance the Mac App Store to get ready for upgrading to OS X Lion. Apple has said that Lion will be available from the Mac App Store (and not on DVD) in July, so we are literally weeks away from its launch. It is not clear how the Mac App Store has been modified, but it is not hard to guess what might have changed.

OS X will be a download from the store like any other application and it will be huge. OS X normally comes on a DVD and it could be a 2 or 3Gb download. That is a lot and if you are on a slow internet connection it will take many hours. What we need is a suspend and resume feature, partly because you might start a download and then not have time to finish it and partly to overcome connection problems. Part way through there might be a glitch that causes your internet connection to be lost and you don't want to have to start again at the beginning.

I don't know whether the Mac App Store supports this because I've never downloaded anything that couldn't be grabbed in one go, but a 3Gb OS X download is different and the chance of a download problem is greater. I sure hope Apple has thought this through and can I resume after an error or power off. If you go to the Store menu there is an option to check for unfinished downloads, so maybe it does actually resume.

Another thing that would be really useful and I hope has been put in the Mac App Store is bandwidth management. Normally you want to download an app from the store as fast as possible. This is fine with 20 or even 50Mb downloads, but when its 2 or 3Gb it would be useful to have bandwidth management. It would be really useful to have the download trickle down over a day or two in the background rather and than use all the bandwidth and render my Mac unusable for any other internet access for the duration.

Another essential feature that I hope is in this update is the ability to burn downloads to a CD/DVD. Now this normally doesn't matter because most downloads are small, but suppose you have several Macs and want to upgrade them all to Lion? You don't want to have to download 3Gb on every single machine! Surely you will be able to download it once and burn it to a DVD, which can then be used to install Lion on other Macs.

Not only would it be useful to create a DVD for upgrading several Macs, you also need a boot disc just in case there's ever a problem with your Mac. It is essential that you be able to boot from a disc and reinstall the OS, run Disk Utility, repair errors and so on.

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Flaw in iOS reinstall from the cloud feature

A new feature was enabled in the app store recently and at first sight it seemed quite useful, but it has an irritating flaw. Here’s how it should work: If you have multiple iOS devices, such as an iPhone and an iPad, you might purchase an app, download it and install it from the App Store on one device and wish it was also on the other device. Now you can easily do this without having to go through the App Store and purchase it all over again. All the apps you have purchased are listed in App Store Updates and you can re-download and re-install any of them with a few taps of the screen.

On the iPhone for example, you go to the App Store, tap Updates at the bottom of the screen, and tap Purchased. On the iPhone you can then select either All or Not on this iPhone. All the apps you have purchased are listed and there’s a little cloud icon next to each one. Tap it and you can download and install the app.

This sounds fine in theory, but the snag is that free apps are technically purchases and they are recorded as purchases against your iTunes user account, even though you never paid anything for them. So here’s the flaw: Every app you ever downloaded gets listed! There are thousands of free apps in the App Store and if you like trying them you will have clocked up a large number of (free) purchases.

Some apps are brilliant of course, but some are not and you might quickly delete them after trying them. They sound interesting in the App Store blurb, but when you try them they turn out to be boring, not what you thought it was, or isn’t appealing for some other reason. All the apps you ever download and rejected are listed on your device for re-installation. They get in the way of the apps you are interested in. You might have tried hundreds of apps if you have had your phone for some time and all the apps you rejected for whatever reason are listed.

This feature hasn’t been thought through properly. It can be fixed though and one thing that could be done is to filter out free apps. There is no need for them to be listed and if I have a free app on my iPad and I want it on the iPhone then I can just find it in the App Store and download it. The second thing to do is to filter out apps that have been deleted. If I download an app and delete it, it means I don’t want it! It shouldn’t come back and pester me to be downloaded again.

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