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.