tech, humor, and nuance by David Chartier—tech distiller, freelance writer, Macworld contributor, wrangler of Finer Things in Tech
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He’s talking about Napkin, a new Mac utility for image annotation that you can think of as a paid, more feature-full competitor to Skitch.
Or, one could argue, what Skitch should’ve been. If one were inclined to argue as such.
Which I’m not saying I am, I’m just pointing out one could.
That’s all.
“My password manager since 2008. If you’re not using 1Password to generate and store secure passwords, you’re most likely doing it wrong.”
Federico Viticci, My Must-Have Mac Apps, 2012 Edition
Bam. And don’t forget: if you buy 1Password 3 in the Mac App Store now, you’ll get a free upgrade to 4 when it comes out. Cross my heart, hope to die.
We haven’t announced the free upgrade window for the website version yet. But considering that most shops do around 30-45 days, and our 1Password 2-to-3 upgrade window was a whopping 8 months (seriously, a surprising number of people yelled at us for being too generous with that), I’ll just stick with “go get it in the Mac App Store.”
“But now, I’ve lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated.”
Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new” product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger).
The Mac App Store is awesome. As a user, it’s my preferred place to buy new apps because it’s so convenient. But in my time speaking to developers as a writer and working for AgileBits, the upgrade issue is a significant problem for developers and sustainability. Maybe it’s something Apple has been working on, since the store is just over one year old, but time is getting short.
The Mac App Store can’t exist without developers stocking its shelves. But developers can’t continue to stock those shelves if they can’t find a way to justify doing so in the long term.
Wil Shipley explains in thorough but digestible detail the problem developers face with no upgrade pricing in the Mac App Store. I would argue this same problem exists for the App Store as well.
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Apple has announced Developer ID, a new identity service developers can use in their Mac apps (and eventually, I presume, iOS apps) that will work hand-in-hand with Mountain Lion’s new Gatekeeper feature. Together, they’ll provide a layer of trust when installing apps, be they from the Mac App Store or signed apps. From Apple’s email:
The Mac App Store is the safest place for users to get software for their Mac, but we also want to protect users when they download applications from other places. Developer ID is a new way to help prevent users from installing malware on their Mac. Along with Gatekeeper, a new feature in Mountain Lion, signing applications with your Developer ID certificate provides users with the confidence that your application is not known malware and has not been tampered with.
Not surprising. Sandboxing is a big deal and, I believe, a good thing for customers in the long run. But it’s a giant pain in the butt right now because it requires many developers to rewrite important code or, in some cases, remove features entirely to get into the Mac App Store.
Apple’s original deadline for apps in the Mac App Store to adopt sandboxing was November 2011. It pushed that to March 1, 2012, and now it’s pushed this deadline out again to June 1, 2012. Fortunately, 1Password has been ready for sandboxing since we arrived in the Mac App Store last September. Just remember that what works for some apps might not work for others.
But here’s the big question for the Mac developer community: is another three months enough?
Steven Frank is a developer at Panic, one of the most widely regarded Mac software shops. He’s also been one of the most outspoken critics in the developer community of Apple’s moves in recent years to lock down devices in the name of protecting user privacy and security. So how does he feel about Gatekeeper, one of Mountain Lion’s most important yet understated features that allows users to control what software they install, and from where?
For a while, there was a great deal of consternation among Mac developers, including this author, that this might be the route Apple would take. In recent years, Apple has shown a trend of following the most hardline possible stance that will benefit users and Apple, often at the expense of developer freedom, and gradually backing in certain affordances (push notifications, for example) as user-impacting problems became evident. So it seemed feasible that we’d wake up one day and Apple would decree that all Mac apps must be sold through the App Store.
But instead, Apple went to considerable effort and expense to find a middle ground.
Apple today announced the Mac App Store has reached 100 million downloads. Jim Dalrymple made sure to ask Apple a few of the typical questions that arise with news like this:
Apple confirmed for me today that those 100 million downloads do not include downloads for its newest operating system OS X Lion. The figure also doesn’t include updates to apps delivered to users from the Mac App Store.
Finally, the figure doesn’t include apps that users downloaded to other authorized Macs.
Translated: that 100 million figure is genuine, unique downloads of free and purchased apps, one per customer per machine.
MAC APP STORE. WE ARE IN YOU.
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BOOM—after all your anticipation, tweets, nail biting, sleepless nights, and sacrificial virgins, 1Password is now in the Mac App Store.
This is no ordinary 1Password, though. It slices, it dices, it has a new system-wide menubar item for Go & Fill, toggling AutoSubmit, and locking/opening the 1Password app. This huge update is also 64-bit zoom zoomy, does the Lion full-screen thing, and loves you up to 125% more than the previous version, guaranteed.
Bonus points: 1Password 3.9 is on sale for half off, which is Latin for “just $20”. That means the current price is cheaper than our 2.x->3.0 upgrade price, and you get a free upgrade to 4.0 when we release it.
Update: 1Password 3.9 is Mac App Store only, and it won’t be coming as an update to the non-MAS version (currently at 3.8.4). I believe we’ll release a couple of updates to 3.8.x for security and compatibility (we just released a beta yesterday to address a couple things), but the 3.9 release is our ramp-up to version 4.0. That’s partly why our celebration sale price is lower than our 2.x->3.0 upgrade price. If you (re)buy 1Password 3.9 in the store, you’ll get 4.0 for free.
