First impressions of the Mac App store

After months of waiting the App Store for the Apple Mac is live at last and I've spent well, about half an hour on it. That's enough to get a first impression though and it looks good, but not quite perfect. First off you have to use Software Update on the Apple menu to download and install an update to OS X. It was just over 100Mb on my Mac. Then you can access the App Store from the Apple menu.

It looks similar to the iTunes store, but without the iTunes menus and other clutter. The iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch app store is the only place to get software for those devices, but there are countless places to get Mac software and the first thing I did was to compare prices. Well, wouldn't you? I've only looked at two items so far, but in both cases the price was cheaper on the Mac App Store. That's good, but it's only two applications and you can't generalise from this. Whenever I buy something I always shop around for the cheapest source. If that's the App Store, I'll use it, but not if it's more expensive.

iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch developers have converted some of their apps to run on the Mac and you can get titles like the very popular Angry Birds. When I looked through the first five pages of comments though, about a third of them complained that the app just crashed and wouldn't work. This could be bugs in the app or a hardware problem. Some apps won't work on certain Macs, for example, if you try to run a modern game on an old Mac with an Intel graphics chipset rather than Nvidia. Was this the problem? I'm not sure whether the App Store will stop you buying and downloading apps that won't work on your Mac and it's something to watch out for. If you do buy something that doesn't work, I wonder if you can get a refund.

It's early days yet and problems like these will get sorted over time. I like the ease with which you can find software and there are lots of free and cheap apps. Providing the prices are comparable to other online stores, then I'll certainly use it.