It’s only natural to speculate about the importance that an extension of the App Store paradigm to the desktop could have, but while the iPhone’s App Store created an entire industry and revolutionized an existing one, it’s important to remember that these are very different sets of circumstances. Here are some of the key differences:

• When the iPhone App Store launched, most people did not have a smartphone or think that they needed one. Today, smartphones are some of the hottest items in tech.
• The Mac software market is alive and well. Distribution through traditional channels has been working fine for most OS X users.
• Windows computers already have robust, feature-rich applications. The App Store’s apps are mostly analogs of existing Windows applications.
• Many Windows users have significant investments in their software, in both time and money.
• Most people already own a capable Windows computer.

To me, this says that it’s pretty obvious that it’s not Apple’s hope to get a bunch of new users with this addition to their OS. What’s more likely is that, having seen what kind of revenue app sales from the iPhone brings in, they wanted to the same sort of post-sale monetization to the Mac. Let’s look at some numbers.

Apple recently said that they had crossed the 3 billion download mark in just under 18 months. Let’s say 25% of all app downloads are paid and the average price a user pays is $2.49. That comes to $1.87 billion in total app sales, with $560 million of it for Apple to keep. That’s over $31 million a month and just over a cool mil a day. That’s huge, considering they aren’t even selling their own software. These numbers are just estimates and could be much lower, but even so…it’s obviously a very significant source of revenue for Apple.

The Mac App Store is nowhere near as full as it’s iPhone counterpart. At launch, Apple boasted “over 1,000″ Mac apps. Compared to the iPhone App Store’s 327,000+ apps, that doesn’t really seem like a lot, even if it is by all measures a perfectly respectable software repository. Roughly 33% of the iPhone App Store’s apps are free offerings. I would estimate the Mac App Store to have more like 20-25% from my limited bit of poking around at it and I’d say the median price for an app is around $8, though that’s hard to judge.

Based on this, Apple stands to make an average of about $2.4 from each Mac app sale, assuming an even distribution among price points (which is a pretty bad assumption, but I’m not a mathematician). That’s almost equal to the total average cost of an iPhone app. Even if we bump it down a bit to account for cheaper apps being bought with higher frequency, at 2$ per sale, it’s nothing to scoff at, especially when considering that projections for Mac sales in 2011 are pretty optimistic. I didn’t have a lot of luck finding projections about Apple’s total projected Mac sales (all anyone cares about this year is the iPad), but Apple will likely sell 11-15 million MacBooks and MacBook Pros this year. Throw in another 5 million iMacs and you’ve got a nice installed base of around 20 million Macs that came with the App Store preinstalled by this time next year. Half of in-store buyers are first-timers, so that’s 10 million new Macs that belong to people with no experience with them whatsoever. If Apple successfully gets these people to buy an average of 5 paid apps each in their first year of ownership, and we completely discount people who have been with OS X for at least one prior machine and those who don’t buy a Mac this year but just continue to use an older one, that’s $30 million in post-sale revenue for Apple from Macs sold in 2011 for doing what essentially amounts to nothing. With Mac sales growing 37% year over year, those numbers are looking pretty awesome for Apple and that is why we have a Mac App Store.

That, and because if Microsoft did it first, it’d be tacky for Apple to follow suit and Jobs isn’t really that keen on tacky.

Having used the Mac App Store, I can’t really say I’m that crazy about the whole idea. The interface is fairly nice and all, sure, and finding things is easy…it’s not an issue of usability or practicality, but one of supporting developers. With the iPhone (which I don’t actually own, but I use Android and the same is more or less true), there’s only one official way to get a paid application onto the phone – buy it from the App Store. Without stealing the app outright, there’s no way to make sure Apple isn’t getting a cut of the money that you’ve decided that a developer deserves. That’s how they like it. With OS X, it’s a different story. I can go to Panic’s site and buy Transmit 4 for 35$ and know that they’re going to get every cent or I can buy it from Apple at the same price and know that they’re going to get a little over 20 bucks. I love Transmit – I want those guys to get all of my money. Apple didn’t make Transmit – they made OS X, which I bought. It’s Panic’s turn.

On the other hand, I do like the idea that if I swap in a new hard drive or buy a new machine, had I bought all of my apps from the App Store, they’d all just magically come back. My Android phone is rooted, so I flash updates that sometimes wipe my phone completely clean and these days, after you sign back in, all of your Market apps reappear within an hour or so…it’s a truly wonderful thing. Having just had my drive wiped by AppleCare, I can definitely say that I see the appeal there. No more lost serials, either…a lot less uncertainty about the software that you own in general. Apple’s got it; it’s cool. I just wish they weren’t trying to cut into all of these dev’s revenue streams with it. A huge majority of Mac software is from small indie dev shops and I want to support those guys just like I want to support home-grown restaurants and local artists. These are the people that are really working for what they get, that are really trying new things. Apple is a huge company and they really don’t need an extra $30 million all that badly. Ten years ago? Sure, but not today.

Given all of this as well as the general backseat the Mac has taken to the iOS device line, it really just feels like this is purely a monetization strategy and not one that really benefits developers or consumers all that much in the long run. Increasing sales by 30% isn’t that significant if your price per unit goes down by 30% at the same time. All that does is raise your support costs. For customers, it means that your developers are likely doing more to accomplish less. I don’t see anything like another gold rush here. I see an easy way for new Mac users to get software. People who are more akin to Mac ‘enthusiasts’ will likely continue to buy software in more traditional ways: from the people who made it.

That said, only time will tell…if there’s one thing Apple usually has, it’s a plan.

Today, while cleaning up, I noticed it still sitting near the sink and suddenly had an idea for a use for it. After a quick measure, a few pencil marks, and some help with the edge of the kitchen counter, I suddenly had a very nice and sturdy little holder for my phone. I fashioned a couple of plastic washers and used them and some small screws to attach a couple of suction cups I had lying around and in about fifteen minutes, I’d created a pretty decent little car cradle for my phone.

I’ve posted a few pics below. Unfortunately, it’s dark and taking pictures of it in the car just isn’t happening, but you should still be able to get the idea.

First, you’ll need the Android SDK installed on your computer. Installation is fairly involved, so I’m not going to cover it. There are also other benefits to having this (taking screenshots, providing developers with debug data, etc), but what we’re after is a utility called adb. adb stands for Android Debug Bridge and is a fairly simple tool that allows you to communicate with your phone via your computer. Follow the steps here to install the SDK, which includes adb:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Make sure you follow the instructions, or you’ll just wind up frustrating yourself.

Note: You may or may not be able to accomplish this process using a file manager from the Market, just by copying the animation zip to your sd card, then moving it to /data/local/ using the file manager on your phone.  You do not need root to write to /data/local/.  My file manager does not allow me to copy or move files but others may.  Still, using adb is much easier in the long run, even if it is kind of a pain to set up. If you have a file manager that will let you do this, you do not need adb.

Next, you need a boot animation to use. You can make one, which I’ll cover later, but now that you spent all of that time installing the SDK, I’m sure you want to test this out with minimal fuss. You can find some here:

http://androidforums.com/htc-droid-eris/56647-boot-animation-gallery.html

along with a wealth of information about this topic. Go ahead and find and download one that you like.

Important: If you are on a Mac or in some other situation where zip files that you download are automatically decompressed, you need to either circumvent this decompression (opt+click on a Mac) or rezip the file using the instructions below in the section about making your own animations.

Now that you have your boot animation, we need to get ready to push it to the phone. First, verify that the file you’ve downloaded is named “bootanimation.zip”. If it is not, change it.

Second, enable USB debugging on your phone. Open Settings, select Applications, then select Development. You’ll see an option for USB debugging. Enable it. Go ahead and connect the phone to your computer via USB if you haven’t already.

Next, we get to actually install it. Open up your terminal or command prompt (Mac users: use Spotlight to find Terminal. Windows users: Press Alt+F2 , type “cmd” and hit enter. Linux users: …you know this, right?) and do the following:

1. use cd to get to where you saved bootanimation.zip
2. type: adb push bootanimation.zip /data/local/
3. type: adb reboot

If all goes well, your phone should reboot and when it does, after the boot image appears, you should see the animation.

If you would like to remove the boot animation and roll back to the default, go back to your terminal and type:

1. adb shell
2. rm /data/local/bootanimation.zip
3. exit

Creating Your Own Animations

Think you’re ready to make your own animation?  The generally accepted format for boot animations is a series of PNG files, scripted with a simple text file. From here on out, I’ll assume you’ve already created the animation in some application and that you are comfortable exporting your animation in PNG format. If not, Google is your friend. You’ll probably want to read this whole section before giving it a go, as file locations matter and so on.

The files can be in any PNG format, as far as I am aware, but the smart thing to do is to export or convert them to 8 bit PNGs with the smallest possible color palette. By smallest possible, I mean the smallest possible one that meets your own quality requirements. You ideally want each PNG file to be between 4 and 32 kb. It’s ok if they’re a little larger, but smaller files result in smoother animations.

The folder structure you need to use is like so:

Next, you need to write the script that tells your phone how to use the PNGs you’ve created. The script is in a very simple format. It will be named desc.txt and saved in the folder containing the folders that contain your PNGS. Open up a text editor.

On the first line, you define the width, height, and frame rate like so:

320 480 30

Android will do a pretty decent job of making the animation fit the screen if it is used on a screen with a different size than yours. I haven’t played around much with the frame rate yet. 30 is pretty fast, but the animation is very smooth. The standard frame rate in video animation is 24 fps. In video games, it is 60.

Next, you’ll have a line like this:

p 1 0 part0

p is just a delimiter and essentially means nothing. All lines after the first line will start with a p. The 1 tells Android to play the sequence of PNGs 1 time, and then the 0 says to pause for 0 frames. This would be a good line to start with if your animation fades in from black or is otherwise not a simple loop.

If you had a part that you wanted to loop, you could enter something like:

p 0 0 part1

for that. the first 0 tells it to loop infinitely.

You can have as many p lines as you like, but each needs its own folder. The desc.txt file for the Nexus One’s boot animation looks like this:

512 256 30
p 1 0 part0
p 0 0 part1

Again, this plays all of the files in part0 once, then plays all of the files in part1 over and over until the OS comes up.

The file names in each of these folders, to my knowledge, need to follow this format: boot_#####.png. This may not actually be necessary, but it’s how I learned to do it. Following this pattern, the first file in the animation would be boot_00001.png. The last might be boot_00095.png. If the last frame in part0 is boot_00024, the first in boot1 should be boot_00025. This may not really matter…feel free to experiment.

Finally, we are ready to zip this up. Make sure that there are no files like Thumbs.db or .DS_Store inside the folders that contain any of the animation files. These will cause an obnoxious white flicker. When you zip your files you absolutely cannot use the built-in compression available via right click in any OS that I know of or your zip will not work. You have to be able to set the zip so that it is not compressed, just rolled into a zip file. I do not know how to do this on Windows, but I do know that it is possible using WinZip. If you are lucky enough to be on OS X or Linux, you can simply issue this command in Terminal from the folder containing the folders named part0, part1, etc:

zip -0r bootanimation.zip .

After that, you’re ready to push it to your phone using the method from the beginning of the post.  Happy animating!

First Impression

When you pick up an iPad, it’s sort of like holding the screen from a 13″ MacBook Pro. There’s a fair amount of heft to it. It’s bright. It takes a moment to figure out exactly how you’re going to approach using this thing. If you intend to type, one hand isn’t the best solution, but a workable one. My biggest overall curiosity about the thing has been how it would be to type on a virtual keyboard of that size, so I first tried it in my lap. The back of the device is very smooth and it does not give you a particularly safe feeling for it to rest on jean clad legs, but I didn’t have any real problems with the device sliding around in practice. That said, I would definitely get a silicone skin for it as soon as humanly possible. I have a one year old child and aluminum isn’t going to offer enough friction if she decides to plow into me.

Usage

The UI is responsive and fast. Things open and close instantly, as you would expect. I noticed very little, if any, lag in performing any of the tasks that I tried out. Using the device is natural. Between the bevy of touchscreen devices flooding the market in recent years and a life of training via science fiction films, all of the ideas behind interaction are pretty second nature. I noticed that sometimes it would fail to register taps on certain things, especially toggling different views in the Maps application. It takes a fairly deliberate press to make it respond.

Typing is about what you’d expect. It’s not that hard, but as a touch typist it’s definitely alien. If you have one or two keyboards you use every day and then suddenly switch to another one, that starts to sum up the feeling. Let’s also say you use a Mac every day and this new keyboard is also attached to a PC and you’re trying to do something that requires a lot of keyboard shortcuts. That’s pretty much it, minus any sort of physical feedback. I don’t think it would take that long to get used to, but it would take some amount of adjustment for sure.

The Screen

Some applications do definitely benefit from the larger layout. Maps was one very good example of this. You get every bit of detail and clarity you would hope for in a device of this type, with the ease of use of an iPhone and minus the browser chrome and Google’s in-page UI you’d find on a laptop. If you are actually using the map to find a place or because you are lost or navigating, it would be a lot more useful to you than something the size of a phone would be. If the regular map view doesn’t do much to impress you, switching to Street View probably will. It’s pretty much like standing there, wherever there is.

Safari is another app that the immediate benefit becomes apparent. Pages render in full size, but all of the niceties of the iPhone’s Mobile Safari are still there. The experience is nice, friendly. You feel like you don’t have to try as hard to use the Internet. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s a bit like using a MacBook’s multitouch trackpad for the first time. When you realize you can scroll, pan, zoom, and switch all without ever really clicking anything, it’s pretty amazing. This takes that idea to another level.

Other applications don’t really utilize the new space much. Wolfram|Alpha’s app isn’t particularly noteworthy. Most text and graphics are rendered in roughly the same size as an iPhone would render them in landscape mode. I didn’t really find the information it presented to be any more easy to absorb. In this case, the iPad doesn’t really offer anything over the iPhone.

Some Final Thoughts

I’ve been a big fan of Apple’s products for over a decade, when iMacs were still CRTs and the logo on a PowerBook was upside down. They have made so many things over the years that made me think, “Wow, I need that.” This iPad isn’t one of them.

My fiance decided to advocate an anti-iPad position while talking about the device with my friend from Apple. Every talking point of hers was refuted to some degree. Refuted may not be the right word. Let’s say instead that he had a retort for everything. For example, “Tablets have been around in one form or another for around a decade but have never really caught on. What makes this different?” To this he said that nobody had ever created an OS specifically for the task at hand. You always get Windows crammed in to a device where it isn’t at home. The iPad’s OS is at home.

On this point, I’m not sure I agree. Yes, Windows may have been crammed in, but I didn’t really get a distinct impression that iPhone OS had been much more than stretched out. Sure, they added a lot of things to make it more pleasant to work with than stock iPhone OS would have been, but they weren’t huge changes or anything. It really is basically scaled up.

There was another point at which she asked if it could replace her Mac or her phone, to which he of course said no. Also not really true. She’s a very casual user and the vast majority of her media is housed on either our home server or my Mac. She has an iPod, but it’s a 2nd gen Nano and she’s happy with it. Google Docs or the iPad versions of iWork could likely fill most office-type needs. The rest of what she needs it for are forums, social sites, and email, all of which it’d do quite well. Given that Apple’s two biggest sources of revenue are iPhones+iPods and Mac notebooks, it’s not surprising that he said she needed all three. You could really feel the sales pitch coming through thick, and he doesn’t even work on the sales floor.

Summary

So, the question on everyone’s mind: Is the iPad just a big iPod touch? Basically, yes. But that is cooler than it sounds.

The next question: Does anyone need this thing? No. The iPad is 100% luxury and entertainment.

And finally: Will people buy them? Some, sure. I definitely see similar devices in a lot of households in the coming years. Widespread adoption couldn’t be more than three to five years away and that might even be a bit off. There are a fair number of good uses for it but there are none that really make you need it. Apple’s set the price point fairly low for the entry model and I imagine that we’ll see a lot of OEMs attempt to compete aggressively on price. Apple generally enjoys fairly wide margins on it’s products and other companies won’t mind sacrificing that a bit if it means a piece of market share.

I see Android playing a huge role in that competition’s market. I also don’t really see Microsoft having much to do in this space for a while. Android is already developed to the point that, if you could get it to boot on an iPad or similar device, it’d already be very usable. It really wouldn’t take that much work (relatively speaking, here) to create something that was a very viable competitor. I think we’ll see a lot of interesting things come out of this in the future.

Will I buy an iPad? Definitely not right now. Personally, I work from home and live in a loft with three computers – two of which are laptops – and a an Android phone. The iPad serves no real purpose for me. I’d certainly gladly accept one as a gift, but I won’t be spending my own dough on one until the idea’s been around for long enough to be more fully exploited. Then we’ll see.