There’s a reason for that.

Apple just opened its App Store for the Mac, but to get at it you must first update to OS 10.6.6 (free).

The update places an App Store icon in your dock, thus:

The format of the AppStore remains the same, confused, poorly laid out and hard to find one used in the iTunes store and the iPad/iPhone App Store:

And if you like photo processing software that is buggy, slow, needs costly hardware to run and may well lose your pictures, you can now get it cheaper than ever. It’s Apple’s Aperture brought to you by the company which never discounts its software. Aperture started life at $499, dropped to $299, dropped to $199 (and kept dropping photos from your catalog) and has now crashed, like the Mac you are using it on, to …. $79.99.

So now you can lose your pictures for less than ever before. Now if you had a crappy product you needed to sell to keep the developers on board, would you be increasing the price? Hardly.

For those seeking to escape the tyranny of Aperture (I exited at v2.0, ten times bitten twice shy) you can see my piece on how to escape here. Lightroom continues to be bog reliable, fast, ever better with new noise reduction and distortion controls in v3 and doesn’t need a supercomputer to run fast. It never locks up for this user. Lightroom is $300 and given that it works, it’s worth a boatload more.

Think things have improved in Aperture v3? Think again. Here’s today’s screen snap from the Apple Discussion Board – notice anything?

Grumbling aside, the OS X AppStore is a move in the right direction, should expand the market for independent developers’ work and adopts the ‘register once, buy easily thereafter’ model familiar to every iPhone and iPad user. That part is well engineered and there is no evidence to suggest that Apple is lying when it says it does not sell your ID.

And you know the best thing about it? It runs perfectly on the best OS X machine made, a HackPro, and supports that third monitor just fine.

Finally, for those of you in high sales tax jurisdictions, buy from the AppStore and you will be charged sales tax. Buy direct from the developer and you will not pay any. Hey, it’s your choice.

Some nice things.

You can see which software I wrote about in 2010 by clicking the ‘photography’ drop down menu below. These are all things I have used and in all cases continue to use as a photographer.

While no one could accuse it of being user friendly, Adobe’s free Lens Profile Creator does a fine job of creating distortion and chromatic aberration correction profiles for those lenses where profiles are not built into Photoshop or Lightroom 3. I created my own profiles for the Olympus 9-18mm MFT lens I use on the Panaasonic G1 and they work well – you can download them by clicking the aforementioned link. These integrate nicely into Lightroom 3 as a point-and-click option in the Develop module.

The very thought of running Windows on any of my Macs frankly disgusts me (after all these years XP still has the most godawful fonts in existence not to mention it’s propensity to constantly lock-up), but on those mercifully rare occasions where there is no choice, such as certain financial tools I use which do not come in a Mac flavor, I have found Oracle’s Virtual Box robust, well supported and, best of all, free. The excrescence that is Windows XP runs in its own little jail or window, free to soil its own underwear without trashing the rest of my Macs’ disks.

On those occasion I want to access my desktop HackPro from a remote location, all I need is an iPad and LogMeIn Ignition, a totally bug free and dead reliable remote client. Not cheap at $29.99 as iPad apps go, but use it just once when you absolutely need to and it has paid for itself.

Finally, last year I named NetNewsWire Software of the Year, as I find it to be the best desktop RSS feed reader out there. For the iPad I have replaced NNW with Reeder months ago and would not go back. The $4.99 Reeder app understands the touch interface well and is a superior product. The back end is provided by the Vampire Squid of the Internet, Google’s reader. I’ll switch as soon as I find a free alternative. Be sure to visit Reeder’s web site – a masterpiece of minimalism and function, like the app. Apple should buy these folks and integrate Reeder into Snow Leopard as its designs accords with much of the thinking of Steve Jobs and Jon Ive in Cupertino.

A couple of Reeder screenshots on the iPad.

Finally a proper Finder.

Update October 14, 2015:

The new security features in OS X El Capitan require a hack to keep Total Finder working, a hack which compromises security. This from the developer:

So for all practical purposes this great app is dead. RIP – you will be missed.

Ask any Mac user what the single worst app which comes with every Mac is and the chances are pretty good that the answer will be ‘The Finder’. ‘The Loser’ would be more like it, if you ask me.

Well, the folks at BinaryAge have fixed much of what ails the stock Finder in TotalFinder, adding the ability to use tabs and multi finder windows, allowing the drag and drop of files across directories/volumes/drives. You can also use cut-and-paste rather than Finder’s copy-and-paste, precluding the need to delete the source file if you really want to move it. The multi finder window shown below is toggled with Command-U.

TotalFinder in dual window mode, with tabs shown.

TotalFinder integrates into Finder but is also available as a separate app, meaning it’s visible in HimmelBar which I use to avoid having on screen icons for applications. So now you can jump into finder rather than Command-Tab’bing or mousing to your on screen app display.

TotalFinder is visible in HimmelBar

MacLampsX you ask? It’s a neat seasonal app which frames your display with Christmas lamps! X-Mas tree? More of the same. 0SEx? No, not what you think. It’s a DVD ripping app. And the little printer icon in the menu bar to the right of the Dropbox icon is Fingerprint which allows my iPad and iPhone to print to any Bonjour printer on the network.

I cannot detect any performance changes on my desktop Mac. Highly recommended for anyone who uses the Finder a lot.

The Vampire Squid of the Internet.

Rolling Stone’s resident shock journalist Matt Taibbi wrote about Goldman Sachs a few months back.

“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Well, swap ‘Goldman Sachs’ with ‘Google’ and ‘investment bank’ with ‘search engine’ and it still reads well.

I wrote of Google’s culture of theft recently, protesting its copying of copyright materials for their profit and their support of net neutrality for the ‘public good’ when the prime beneficiary is Google.

Now this:

Now, I simply despise Microsoft for the hours of my life they have wasted rebooting PCs and losing data, but as of now I’m switching to Bing for my default search engine in the naïve belief that they actually do a tad less evil than Google. There is simply no circumstance on earth which will have me change my opinion of Microsoft but, in this case, it’s the lesser evil. Even the iPad/iPhone have an option to do this – go to Settings->Safari.

Would you trust Google with anything? Garnering all this data in their drive-by shootings is no accident. A team of people wrote that code with the specific intent of theft and profit, and the code of ethics in a corporation comes from the top. You don’t suddenly spontaneously breed criminality in the lower ranks. Those workers take their clues from their managers, and so on up the tree. Just like at Goldman Sachs.

And when you find your stolen photographs on Google, well, good luck suing them.

Should you read of my untimely demise any day now, just look to the Google Hit Squad of Uzi-bearing ninja assassins.